Here we are. Solstice.

It's a couple days until the actual night, but I'm in that liminal space now. This is, finally, the dark fertile peace. It's the rest before germination. Everything before was just inputs, ready to be broken down into the new year's growth.

I never sleep well before I load animals. Loading took a couple days (as it should, to ( Read more... )

I've just finished scalding and gutting a suckling pig. She was born Sept 29 so that puts her at just shy of 7 weeks. She's a nice size for roasting and the scalding went pretty ok; it would have done really easily in a mechanical plucker I think. She had a rectal prolapse that I couldn't get to go back inside her; I saw it this morning and brought ( Read more... )

4 roaster pigs and up to 15 geese in Telkwa before noon on Dec 17th, poultry done on the Friday pigs done on the Monday. I'm really hoping I can get them into the SUV without trailer.

4 adult pigs or whatever in Vanderhoof dropped off on April 19th.

Today was a slaughter day. It was harder for me than they've been before, and I suspect the sadness of it will linger: these are the first sows I've slaughtered, that is, the first ones who had babies for me. One of them, Sparky, was one of my original sows. They were both good girls.

The kill was clean, and the bleed out was very good: when I stuck ( Read more... )

I tend to want to write in the evening and *do* in the morning. I tend to have time to write at work in the morning. It leaves me a little topsy turvy feeling ( Read more... )

At this time last year I got my first muscovy "ducks" (which are not actually ducks in the same way coastal redcedars are "thuja" and not "cedrus" or rose of sharon isn't a rose- their common name is a legacy of our tendency to reuse colonial names instead of using new names for new species). There were five of them, all female: Lilac, Silver, ( Read more... )