After many tribulations with the pigs (left, if you peer closely, you can see the current wwoofer Mat walking two of them home from my neighbour's hillside, which they had escaped to - they were very happy to come back with him as long as he kept chatting) the two boars finally made it to the butcher's, and then back home to my big freezer. (Need a truly big freezer on this kind of farming enterprise.) We tried some chops earlier this week. Fabulous!! Really, not like pork at all . . . . like some previously unknown super-meat. As a first-time pig-keeper, I felt particularly pleased and proud. And the other members of the Transition Monmouth Pig Group are equally pleased. Rearing pigs on planet-friendly locally-grown organic feed really works. Being ignorant, I fed them at the rate set out in the text books; next year I will go more backyardy, and feed them less carbs, only once a day, and get them to eat at least their five-a-day from the veg waste. Cheaper, healthier for planet/pigs/humans, far more sustainable. It's win-win. And someday (soon?) there will be skimmed milk for them.
I invited a local dowser to the farm, trying to locate an earlier water-well, in case I ever cannot pump the spring water up from the bottom of the valley to the main tank; but he says there never was a well here, and past-time farmers used to carry water up from the brook. That seems ridiculously hard work, but back then people just did do the things that were needed to stay alive. I do hope, though, that I am never reduced to fetching water from there! It's filthy, apart from the labour! Our luxury oil-fuelled lifestyle gives us so much more than fast transport and computers. I am hoping to spend the winter working out what to replace, with what (the Little Mill Farm Energy Descent Action Plan). I can replace coal and oil with farm-grown wood; but what do I replace chainsaws with? It will have to be saws and axes. Must acquire some really top-quality ones. That means importing from Sweden, because British-made tools are all disposable rubbish. And so the thinking goes on. I don't have much time for farming these days . . . . .
By the way, the dowser, embarrassed at failing to find a new water supply for me, then dated the farm and watermill. The oldest part of the farmhouse is 1560. The mill dam, and an earlier mill, are 1570. The leat and later mill building are 1630. There is documentary evidence placing those at 1628 - so dowsing does work.
