It’s a grey, drizzly Monday but the sun keeps coming out in half hour bursts. So, I’m alternating between indoor and outdoor jobs and slowly getting stuff done.
I’ve just been massaging a mite and lice deterrent into Emily, Olive, Mabel (and Rose when I can catch her). It’s a mix of virgin olive oil and essential oils – tea tree, rosewood, lavender, patchouli and peppermint.
The damp weather and our struggle to keep pig bedding dry has meant an influx of lice and what I suspect is pig scabies. Determined not to resort to chemicals I Googled organic treatments and found a variety of ideas for both humans and pigs, most of them almost identical. And so several times in the past couple of weeks I’ve headed down the hill with a recycled shampoo bottle full of oil and a pair of rubber gloves.
Emily and Stanley have a tendency to fall over at the slightest hint of a rub and so they were fairly easy to treat. With the slipperiness of the oil and the heady aroma of the essential oils, the piggies were clearly loving every minute of it!
Rose and Mabel were a little harder to convince. Rose just doesn’t trust humans in her paddock and Mabel is usually wary. There’s something about this skin treatment though. The first time I tried I actually managed to convince Rose to accept a massage and despite her attempts to resist it I think in the end she rather enjoyed it. My attempts since have been a little less successful but she at least allows me a good 10 seconds before she runs off.
Mabel on the other hand just has to smell the oil and she rolls over and allows herself to completely relax. In fact she was rather put out when I got up to leave just before and came after me and nudged the bottle and grunted. A couple of rubs later and over she went again.
It has to be said that a pig is far easier to massage with a slick of oil on their skin.
As for whether the treatment is working, it would appear so. Emily who seemed to be suffering the worst of the mites has skin now that only looks mildly irritated. Another treatment or two and I suspect everything will be fine.
I can’t see any more irritation on Mabel but Rose I’m not so sure about. I’m not convinced her condition is improving and she just won’t let me get too close to really inspect. She’s rubbed a large section of hair off her back and her skin is hard, lumpy and scaly. The only good thing about it is that it doesn’t appear to cause her any pain. It’s irritated though so I need to come up with a good solution. Perhaps just olive oil and tea tree oil by themselves or with a bit of calendula oil.
The pig bedding issue has become a bit of a nightmare this winter. Despite topping up over summer the pigs have all insisted in digging into it down to ground level, mixing chip with dirt. The subsequent wet weather has caused a huge headache. The pigs have created mini moats around their housing with their trotters. These fill with rain, the dampness seeps in the edges of the housing, add to that a rain-drenched piggie and the dirt in the chip turns to mud and suddenly the bedding is damp.
And then unexpectedly we very suddenly had to remove Mabel and Rose from their piglets.
Their piglets were 3-months old, Mabel had dried up and was just getting on with it but Rose hadn’t dried up and was suddenly getting very tetchy with both Mabel and the piglets. She was becoming quite manic at mealtimes, the food was plenty but clearly the lack of grass was taking its toll. She would attack every pig in sight at mealtime.
Aaron quickly erected a new pig house on the bottom paddock. We had nothing to put down as bedding except wet woodchip and so that is what we had to use.
Our local suppliers of woodchip can’t provide any that’s dry and I will only use our last 3 hay bales as a last resort. Hay is the worst bedding to use because it soaks up moisture straight away and then becomes rank very quickly.
A pig sleeping on wet bedding is a recipe for disaster. It might work for wild pigs but there’s a bit of difference between wild and domesticated free-range. Things were looking very dire for a good week there while we tried desperately to come up with an alternative. And then I started to think about how the sows going into labour often rip off low manuka tree branches for their nests.
So armed with secateurs and vege crates we waited for a warm, sunny day and started cutting lots of lush, feathery branches of manuka. Fortunately we have a huge supply of the stuff on our land.
We threw a large mound of tea tree into the house and moved the girls in. To be honest, I wasn’t totally convinced the idea would work but the next day I looked in the house and it was clear the girls had made the most of the tea tree, creating themselves a nice, cozy pig nest for two.
Since then we’ve been regularly pruning our trees and adding crates of branches to the various pig housing.
The pigs certainly don’t seem to mind the smell or the feel and tea tree has the added bonus of being both antiseptic and anti-parasitic.
The tea tree on damp woodchip actually stays quite dry we have decided our best option now is to bring in a truckload or two of damp woodchip. We will pile it into the houses on the already damp areas, which aren’t currently being slept on, and then keep topping up the actual nests with tea tree. Fingers crossed the chip actually manages to dry out a bit and keeps the mud down.
Everyone keeps saying this winter isn’t particularly wet but then why have we suddenly had this issue? It’s not like we didn’t top up the bedding over summer but clearly it wasn’t enough.
So that’s another note for summer – top up the bedding in the pig housing and when we think we’ve done enough, do it again so there’s twice as much as we think we need.
Eggsasperating!
Bloody ducks! 8 months of no laying and plenty of pleading and bargaining on my part, all to no avail. Admittedly the pleading has become more threatening as time passes by.
“You don’t want to lay? Fine don’t lay, but let me tell you that Duck a l’orange is looking pretty damn tempting right now.”
Being nice, being horrible, none of it has worked
And then last week the temperature plummeted overnight. It was 1°C and at 4am in the morning there was a frost that made my fingers burn with pain as I fed the piggies. Oh my god, there’s nothing much that beats that intense aching pain of cold. It’s like an ice cream headache in the fingers.
As for trying to wash the buckets after feed out, the top of the water in the bucket outside has an ice crust on it and the water beneath is so damn cold my hands lose their ability to grip properly. Thank god it doesn’t snow in our parts. I’d never cope.
But I digress, we had a frost and then hey presto, eggs! Half a dozen in one hit. A week later and the daily output is increasing; I collected 11 yesterday.
Suddenly I have a fridge full of duck eggs and I’m struggling to find the customers to buy them.
I have only 6 colleagues that will take them off my hands and so now I have to start advertising further afield. Ultimately I’d like to sell them at the gate but we need to set something up for that. We need to build a box to keep the eggs in and work out what we’re going to do about an honesty box. Murray and Patty used to have a jar and they reckoned they never lost the money. I guess it’s not a major as it would only amount to about $6 a day so it’s no great loss if someone does steal it.
$42 a week would cover our weekly cost for duck and chicken feed so at least we’d be breaking even while they’re laying.
Of course if we bumped off most of our roosters and some of our drakes we’d actually be clawing back some of the money we’ve lost over the last 8 months.
We haven’t done that deed yet. I’m not sure what it is about chopping the head off a chicken then plucking and gutting it that I’m not looking forward to…
Aaron Decides He Can Do More
After seeing numerous notices in the Kaiwaka Bugle begging for volunteers, Aaron finally decided he should enquire about joining the Kaiwaka St John’s Ambulance service. He rang Marj next door to enquire about the next meeting, went along to one of their weekly Tuesday meetings and that was it. He now has a uniform, has started going on call, attends weekly training, has started going to extra training courses and is doing study online.
The first event he attended the ambulance got to turn its siren on and they had to call in a helicopter. It was an exciting start to his new hobby/interest.
Already Aaron has decided to throw himself into it, volunteering as often as he can, and attending whatever training is available so that he can get to a senior level.
It’s all very community spirited and is a great way for him to network and to restore some credibility to the de Jonge name. I think it will in many ways finally establish us as a part of the community.
So Aaron’s getting out, meeting new people, being challenged and getting time out from farm and work.
As for me, well I get to pick up the slack. I’m even more tied to the farm than I was before. Those ‘urgent’ projects will get pushed back a bit more and there will be some jobs that will now take twice as long as there will only be me to do them.
Quite frankly I think it’s the worst timing to decide to get into this. I’m not sure how Aaron thinks he can keep everything going. Already he is struggling to do his full hours at work because of farm commitments and now this on top. I’m still working fulltime so I have nothing left to give. As for my desperate need of a break and some time out, that’s clearly not going to happen anytime soon.
It has to be said that sometimes I feel like I’m the one making all the sacrifices and getting fuck all in return. No doubt Aaron feels the same but at least he gets time out and time to socialise.
As work often takes him down to Auckland and beyond it is often easier for him to stay the night with friends or family than come home. At times it will mean I have to take leave to come home early and it usually means I have to get up earlier. Okay, so it’s not a huge sacrifice on my part but these things add up over time and at the moment the rewards for me seem to be zero.
Poorer Than Ever
The rewards are zero because we’ve thrown ourselves in the deep end and hiked the mortgage payments up to $4000 a month until the end of the year. That’s my entire salary and some of Aaron’s as well. That leaves us virtually nothing for anything but bills and livestock.
It’s all in a good cause because our fixed interest rates are quite low. Each month our goal to be mortage free within 10 years gets closer. On the other hand life is quite miserable when there’s barely enough money to get a haircut. I think it’s been 9 months since my last and my hair looks truly awful.
Aaron still has his wine club and book club giving him something to look forward to every couple of months, but my paltry $6 non-winning lotto ticket every week just hasn’t been doing it for me lately.
So I’ve gone a bit mad and now every Saturday morning I drive into Kaiwaka to the Italian La Nonna bakery and spend $10-$15 on bread. I was desperate to find something that I could look forward to each week and the bread is definitely filling some of that gap.
Their bread, while so-so when they first opened is now quite outstanding. No doubt they have a good ferment going and the flavour has developed over time as a result. The Olive bread is just exquisite and I have a hard job choosing between their focacia and ciabatta as a close second.
I suspect I sound like a spoiled child complaining about the struggle to pay off our mortgage when I know our parents and grandparents had just as big financial hardships. And yet how is it that people of those generations often managed to pay off their mortgages in their 40’s and often on one salary?
Aaron and I are apparently middle to high income Kiwis but it sure as hell doesn’t feel like it. Yes it would be fine if we paid our mortgage in line with the 30-year term but who the hell wants to still be paying a mortgage at 65?
I’ve been excessively careful with my money ever since I started earning and yet it’s never really stopped being a struggle. So what the hell am I / are we doing wrong??
We’ve got no savings, no retirement plan and no expendable income, so where’s my money?
