Tag Archives: homesteading

February 14, 2013 · 1:07 am

Miss Piggy didn’t bring home the bacon

Allow me to introduce Miss Piggy. The stalk with the red grain on it is called maiz sorgo.

This month, my husband is pig-sitting. Yep, that’s right. He has loaned out what was once Miss Piggy’s bungalow to someone who is building pig corrals in La Yacata. But I’m not happy about it.

First, this was to be supposedly a week or so home away from home for 3 piglets. But we are now pushing a month with our 8 piggy guests. Then management (us) was not providing the intercontinental breakfast with this service, nor the daily room cleaning. However, the owners are a bit lax with their service provisions, and the 8 little piggies are not so quiet with their protestations about a dirty room and late dinner.

And then there is the dinner itself. The owners bring the typical churros (pellet processed pig food) and then add a creative dish of raw chicken intestine. Every fly in La Yacata comes to dine. I objected strongly to this diet, but being a gringa what do I know? According to the owners, that’s the way it’s always done.

Now one of these little ladies has developed a prolapsed rectum due to diarrhea caused by this diet. It’s as awful as you might imagine, so I’m not posting any pictures of that. Even after I pointed out that they needed to provide a better quality food or the other 7 will suffer the same fate (there isn’t any cost-effective treatment and will end in her death), the response was that’s the way it’s always done.

And truth be told, it is. Last year I was all gung-ho to get a pig. We had a perfect little space in the back. Thus began the quest for Miss Piggy. We traveled hither and yon asking about at pig farms. We discovered that those who raised pigs for meat were raising sterilized animals. I didn’t want a sterilized animal, my vague piggy plan had lots of piglets in the picture. So we kept looking.

We went in search of breeders. Town after town, no luck. Some pig breeders had a litter ready to sell, but wouldn’t just sell us one. It was all 6 or none. Seems pigs were sold by weight to the bigger commercial companies that came once a week to the market. The pig breeder said he would get a better price if he had more pigs on the scale.

And the places these pigs were living. EEEWWWW! Now, I’m not exactly a city girl. We rented a house next to a pig farmer when I was a girl. But there was nothing to compare that large, open, clean-air pen with the corrals that these pigs lived in. The floors and walls were cement so that the pigs wouldn’t dig around in them. They were barely big enough for these enormous monsters to turn around in. And they were built at a slant so that their liquefied excrement would drain out of the corral and into an open drainage ditch which eventually connected to the sewer of the owner’s home. The idea was to grow the pigs as quickly and as mammothly as possible and then sell them to the carnicerias (meat markets) for carnitas (deep fried pork). So the feed these growers used was, yep, you guessed it, a combination of the pig processed feed (churros) and chicken intestine (for protein).

Eventually, we did find a pair of unsterilized piglets. I felt that one pig was enough to begin with, so we gave the little boy pig to my in-laws to take care of. Unfortunately, my mother-in-law didn’t take kindly to having another mouth to feed, and he became carnitas before he was even big enough to provide a mouthful of meat for each family member.

Waiting for the milk to go on their cereal of milled maiz sorgo.

Yummy! Couldn’t even wait til we had the milk all poured before they started in!

But we kept Miss Piggy. (You need to know that we only give names to animals that we don’t plan on eating, helps to keep the psychological effect of eating one’s pets to a minimum.) She gobbled up the mixture of milled maiz sorgo (a red grain) and goat’s milk that was her main feed. Occasionally, just for variety, there were corn bits mixed in or a dash of alfalfa or this weedy sunflower looking plant that didn’t have a flower called gelite that she just absolutely loved.

She was quite the lady, kept her bungalow as clean as a whistle. She pooped in one corner, had her water in another, ate from a third, and slept in the final corner. She pranced about and greeted us happily. When we cleaned her pen, we gave her poop to the chickens, who found all sorts of overlooked treasures. As her diet was all natural, it was ickier to clean up the dog poop than hers.

Posing for pictures!

I had some notion that we could train Miss Piggy to go out with the goats and dig to her heart’s content in the fallow fields, but once established in her bungalow, Miss Piggy had no desire to roam. She wouldn’t come out for all the coaxing in the world.

However, one day when my husband was out of town, and I was late with dinner, she managed to get out and eat all our young fruit trees down to nubs. When I got home, she was back in her pen, the only sign she had been wandering about were tiny hoof prints all about the muddy back yard and of course, no trees.

My husband kept saying she wasn’t growing as fast as she should. I suppose compared to the behemoth porkers in those fattening pens, she didn’t grow as big or as fast. But she didn’t smell, she didn’t have an excess fly infestation, she didn’t have any health problems and I was happy with her growth.

But came the day when her cost outweighed her benefits, and she had to be sold. An Amish leprechaun with a silver hoop earring came one day to take her to market. And that was that.

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Filed under Animal Husbandry

Tagged as Animal Husbandry, homesteading, Pets, Pigs, raising pigs

January 25, 2013 · 3:22 pm

On being a burro

Nothing having money for a proper saddle, my father-in-law crafted one with blankets and cement bags.

To call someone a burro, is to imply they aren’t intelligent and therefore not much use besides working in the fields. It’s true, they don’t have the panache that horses do, and therefore true caballeros (gentlemen, although literally translates as one who rides a horse) are not donkey owners. But I must admit, burros have their uses.

We had our first introduction to donkeys when we bought my father-in-law a young male burro that he had his eye on for awhile. He was christened Margarito, and my father-in-law was delighted. My mother-in-law was not so delighted. Her father-in-law, the father of my father-in-law, was kicked by a burro and died of internal injuries and she was sure his son would go the same way.

Margarito was a handful to be sure. Burros aren’t like horses. They may be smaller, but they are unpredictable. With a horse, it’s possible to sense when something is up, but not so with a burro. All of sudden, just for the heck of it, it may kick out his back legs or roll on the ground, not caring that it might be still attached to a plow or someone might be on its back.

So I have what I consider a healthy fear of burros.

Margarito had wanderlust. Periodically he would pull himself loose and head out into the great beyond. Then we had to go and find him. Once he went missing for two weeks. We finally found him when a neighbor mentioned that he had seen him tied about 3 miles away. So there we tromped to get him back.

Finally, my father-in-law traded Margarito for an elderly pregnant burra he named Chona. Chona was an experienced work donkey. Even at 10 months along, she could pull the plow with the best of them. She didn’t fuss or buck.

In due time, she presented my father-in-law with Fabian, a wooly little burro. My in-laws also profited by selling cups of burra milk for 40 pesos per cup. Apparently, it has medicinal properties and people from town would drive all the way out to La Yacata in order to have freshly squeezed milk. Donkeys are not like cows. They do not give an overabundant supply, just enough to feed their offspring, so the rarity of it increases its value. This extra profit won over my mother-in-law to the benefits in keeping a donkey around.

Fabian, being young and male, was unruly. When he was big enough to be hitched to the plow, his training began. But he did not take to it at all. Berinche after berinche. (Tantrums) Once, he had managed to uproot the entire tree he had been tied to. Being loose, he started moseying about. However, the fact that the tree was following him, must have spooked him and he reared up and took off running down the road. He wasn’t hard to find, leaving a well-swept trail behind him. Eventually, Fabian was sold.

The one on the left is Donquita, and Chona is on the right.

Then my husband decided he too wanted a burra to plow and we bought Donquita. She was about a year old and so skinny. She had been living in a corral with about 10 other donkeys raised specifically for their milk.

Donkeys, when mild tempered and trained, make excellent plow pullers.

She worked well beside Chona and between the two of them, we plowed and planted about 2 acres in total this past year.

However, Donquita was jumpy. My father-in-law (and myself) had the concern that by accident she might give a back kick and hit my son. When she did eventually kick my husband, we sent her up the lane to live at my in-laws, where now pregnant, we await the birth of her first La Yacata burrito.

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Filed under Animal Husbandry

Tagged as Animal Husbandry, burros, Donkeys, homesteading

January 17, 2013 · 4:45 pm

101 Perritos

Cocoa, a miniature puppy, who is not destined to become a rabbit eater as Mr. Fluffy outweighs him by 5 pounds.

Meet Cocoa, the most recent find in a long line of puppies that made its way to our doorstep. As La Yacata is just past the town limits, it seems we are considered a dumping ground for unwanted pets, mostly puppies, but some kittens as well.

Frank and Jesse died of internal parasites. Tiger escaped the compound and was trampled by the neighbor’s cow.

We haven’t had much success in keeping any of these strays, but we always provide a safe haven for the duration of their stay.

Katie on the left got caught between the double row of tires on a truck.

Some puppies become dogs who eat our rabbits, chickens, ducks or quail. The first occasion necessitates finding a new home for the dog, for once it has developed a taste for our other livestock, it will stop at nothing to make its own lunch.

Snowy became a duck eater and had to be sent elsewhere.

Chispas found us with his tail already mocha (cut off). He later became a chicken eater and had to be rezoned.

Playing ball with Bear, who became a chicken eater and had to find a new home.

Zoe had a partiality for rabbits and had to move elsewhere.

Then there are the puppies that have been poisoned. We try our best to keep our dogs in our enclosed area, however just a minute of inattention while bringing the goats in, sometimes results in a fatality. The elderly farmer who lives that the entrance of La Yacata, seems to think it his God-given duty to exterminate the animals of La Yacata. He leaves dead chickens laced with rat poison about and of course, what dog can pass that by without a taste.

Blackie was poisoned.

Blackie 2 was poisoned.

Smokey was poisoned.

Smokey 2 was poisoned.

Some of our puppy finds are just too little to survive without their mother. The mother having been poisoned or shot, we sometimes find a passel of puppies howling in hunger and do our best to keep them alive on goat’s milk.

This one didn’t make it either.

On occasion, we also find grown dogs in La Yacata. Unfortunately, these are often the fighting dogs (typically pit bulls) and are in such a state of abuse and neglect, covered in open infected sores, eyes oozing with disease that we can not, in good conscience bring them into our home to infect the other animals.

Sometimes, mama dogs are seen wandering about in La Yacata. Again, we don’t take them into our house because obviously, they have puppies somewhere nearby. For these poor scrawny mama dogs, we leave water and bones outside. They often return the favor by protecting the house from nighttime prowlers and coyotes.

With the demise or relocation of each dog, we swear we won’t take in another one. It’s just too sad to love and lose again and again. However, before too long, another puppy finds its way to our door, and we have no choice but to risk it again.