And Then There Were Ten

We lost Spot today.  The only guess I have is that she was behind momma when she rolled over.  There were no apparent injuries to her.  I found her out in the dirt near where Ruby likes to lie down to nurse.

Ruby was in a horrible mood after I removed the dead baby.  She didn't want anyone in with the babies...not even me.  We were supposed to give Freightliner her meds, but decided to hold off when it became apparent that Ruby was not going to let me steal another baby and live.  I think we may go with the single dose of LA200 for Freightliner instead of the five days of Penecillin, just for ease.

Injury

Freightliner has gotten a small cut at the top of her right front leg.  I noticed it yesterday because there is an abcess about the size of a golf ball just below it.  I pulled her out of the pen and sprayed the cut itself with Blu-Kote (I now have a blue thumb and forefinger now).  It definitely penetrated into the cut as she started scratching it with her hooves the minute I put her back with mommy...but I think that we need to do a bit more intervention.

I called Dr. Crawford to see about dosage for LA200.  He suggested penecillin.  I prefer LA200 only because it is a single injection, whereas the penecillin needs to be done every day for five days.  But, I know that he will give me the best advice.  The dosage for a piglet around 4 pounds is .2ml for either drug.  So, we will be pulling her out for the next few days and giving Frieghtliner her meds.  I will probably bring her all the way into the house to do the injections, mostly so that Ruby doesn't hear the squealing and get upset.  My biggest challenge now is to find a small enough needle. All the needles we have are 1-1/2 inches long and I do NOT want to try to use a long needle for such a small injection.  I will head to the feed store today and try to find a 1/2 inch 22 guage needle.

I feel fortunate that it is Frieghtliner with the injury.  She is one of the strongest babies we have.  I think that of all the babies, she can handle it.  I don't want to take any chances though.  She is the one that I think we may use as a replacement breeding gilt if Hammy doesn't take.

Oh, I noticed a strange inflammation on Mouse's rump.  She has no injuries but it seems like there is a small soft sack of fluid on her butt cheek.  We'll keep an eye on it.

Also, Ruby has been coughing a lot since giving birth.  I don't think that lungworm is an issue.  I wormed everyone about two months ago.  I do want to keep watch on her though.  The last thing I need is to have a sick momma.

Exploring

The babies have quickly become comfortable with their surroundings and are exploring the pen with gusto.  They like to follow Ruby around, checking out the bucket when she is eating her grain, chewing on hay, and running around the shed.  The little ones have even made their way into the "big pig pen" where Hammy and Jaws are.  This worries me a bit, but so far the big pigs have ignored the babies.  And if I am outside, Chou Chou and Mouse (the two runts who have really accepted the whole bottle feeding thing) will run through the holes in the fence to find my voice. 



Such a contented pig.

Dobby, our dog, isn't quite sure what to make of it.  She watches the babies with interest, but keeps a safe distance from the fence.  I don't think that she would attack them, although they sure are fun to watch.

We managed to get Ruby's mud puddle dried up, thus keeping the babies from the mud, but Ruby found another way to cool down.  And in the process of cooling off in her bathtub, she floods the water into a new mud puddle, thus circumventing our attempts to remain mud-free in the pen.  I prefer Ruby bathing in the tub because it keeps the babies safe and her teats free of mud, but it still causes some trouble.  For one, I am refilling that tub on a daily basis, just to make sure she has water to drink.

A few more of the babies have been given names.  The one with the half pink face is named "Oreo."  She is growing so well.  She's still pretty shy of my attention, but we're working on it.  The second runt that is all black is now "Mouse."  I mentioned her in the last post, but thought I'd introduce her.  She is doing ok but I sure would like to see more growth.  I did see her and Chou Chou nursing this morning and that is a plus.  I was hoping that they would be able to adjust to a bottle and mommy at the same time.  The little boy with a perfect band is "Mr. Perfect."  He would be a nice boar, if we needed one.  While I didn't want to name her "Spot," I seem to continue to call her that, so I guess it's her name.  She has a beautiful black spot in the middle of her white band.  The rest are still waiting for names.

Needle Teeth

A friend came over this afternoon to help me with the piglets and their needle teeth.  Needle teeth grow in pairs on both sides and on the top and the bottom...eight in all.  And they are sharp.  The reason for removing them is to avoid nursing issues with momma.  Obviously, the babies can bite pretty hard with these teeth and if they bug her enough, she'll push them off of her.  In addition, we've already seem a few minor injuries on snouts from brothers and sisters biting each other while scrapping for a teat or playing with each other.

The needle teeth are small enough that we actually used a pair of toenail clippers to remove them.  Just slide the tooth into the clippers and snap, off it comes.  The baby squeals, but not from any true pain inflicted by cutting the teeth...moreso because she doesn't want to be held still with her mouth open (just like any other baby).  While Ruby is a very tolerant momma, she does not like it when her babies are upset.  And since we had to do this, we decided the safest plan was to remove the babies one or two at a time, take them outside of the pen, clip their teeth, and then return them to momma.

This worked for most of the babies.  I think by the time we were reaching for number eight, Ruby had decided that we were unwelcome and had pushed her babies into the back corner of the shelter and was guarding them quite effectively.  We decided that I could finish the last few over the next couple of days.  This decision was reaffirmed when my friend told me of her experience being attacked by a sow.  The sow grabbed her calf, pulled her over onto her back, and clamped immediately onto her neck, preparing to kill her.  My friend was saved by her two brothers who beat the pig until she let go.  With that very visual story in mind, I will be particularly cautious around my momma.

Chou Chou

Freightliner, on her first day.

Some of the babies have started to become individuals to me.  I am out with them at least three times a day...sometimes to feed, sometimes to water, but also sometimes just to sit.  Where once I saw a mass of balck and white, I am now seeing eleven very different little piglets.  They do not all have names yet, although some have obvious markings that lend themselves to a name - "Spot" comes to mind.
There are two very good sized girls who are constantly arguing with each other.  One has almost the identical markings of her father, Jaws.  I believe her name will be "3-D" as in the movie sequel.  The other is all black and built like a tank.  Her name is "Freightliner."  These two girls will most likely be our best candidates for breeding gilts if we need to replace Hammy.

Chou Chou looking for milk.

The three runts are not all named.  But one is.  Her name is "Chou Chou" (think "shoe shoe").  It means "little cabbage" and is a term of endearment in French.  Chou Chou is tiny.  Her front legs seems to curl back a little more than usual, making her walk on her tiptoes.  She doesn't seem to have trouble walking and I think this will probably correct itself over time.  Chou Chou has figured out how to bottle feed perfectly.  Each time I come out to the pen and talk to Ruby and the babies, Chou Chou comes running over to my feet, squealing and snorting around.  If I pick her up, she immediately starts nudging my hands and my chest, looking for her bottle.  If she finds a finger, she will clamp down on it.  I have learned to always come with a bottle.  Chou Chou is the only runt that has really figured out how to latch and suckle on a bottle.  She is going to be hard to give up.

Another one of the runts has started to figure out the bottle.  She is all black.  I haven't found a name for her yet.  We will have to just wait and see.  I will try to post pictures of everyone tonight.  If you have any suggestions for names, let me know in the comments.

We actually have three of the eleven already spoken for.  I think we will be raising two for ourselves plus a third as a replacement gilt (just in case).  That means, we only have another five left for sale.  I cannot believe it.  And they're only a couple of days old.

Eleven

Well, our little injured piglet didn't make it.  We did our best to help her recover from a laceration on her leg, but she was so young and had to be such a fighter to begin with just to get her fair share, that with the injury she was unable to keep up.

Last night, we wrapped her leg but when I came out this morning, I couldn't find her.  I knelt in the straw to count again, and heard a squeal.  I quickly dug through the straw and found the little girl, buried six inches down.  She was still alive, but not doing well.  M decided that she should be named Charlotte because in Charlotte's Web, she dies and he knew that this piglet might die.  I brough her into the house and wrapped her in a heating pad.  This seemed to help a bit.  She had been very cold.  Piglets are unable to regulated their body temperatures when they are little and she was nowhere close to the 85-90 degrees that she should have been.

Once warm, I tried to give her a little milk with a bottle, but she didn't take it.  She began to gasp and twitch.  We could see that she was passing.  Rather than allow her to suffer, we dispatched her tiny body with a single gunshot.  We are now holding steady at eleven piglets...and all are doing well.

I have begun to bottle feed the three runts.  I go out every few hours and give each of them as much milk as I can get into them...usually only a couple of teaspoons.  They aren't as interested in being bottle fed as the baby goats were.  You have to almost pry their mouths open and they never really latch and start suckling on their own.  But I'm getting a little something in them and I hope it gives them the boost they need.

We set up two heat lamps in the shelter last night.  They are both fairly low to the ground and I am finding that it works best to turn the heat lamps off in the daytime so that Ruby will go in the shelter and lie down.  Otherwise, I think it must be too hot for her, as she tends to lie outside in the dirt.

One mistake (of many, I'm sure) is allowing Ruby to still have a mud puddle in the pen.  She has wallowed her way into the muddy water and then settles down to let the babies feed.  But the babies aren't much taller than the mud.  And her teats are covered in a thick brown laquer that doesn't seem to be too appealing to the kids.  We will be letting her mud puddle dry up for the time being.  At least until the babies are big enough to wade into it safely.

The Babies Have Landed

I had pretty much given up checking on Ruby every hour this week as she just didn't seem to be getting any closer to delivering and I knew that I wasn't going to make it happen any faster by staying up every night.  So last night, I succumbed to a cold, took some Nyquil and went to sleep.  I didn't even check on her before I crawled into bed.

This morning, I looked out the bedroom window and could see our dog sniffing the air next to the pig pen.  I immediately threw on my clothes, slipped into my shoes and ran out to the shelter.  Sure enough, I didn't even have to enter the pen to see a mass of squirming black and white bodies next to one tired momma.  I turned around, ran back to the house and yelled for the boys to come out with the camera.  I then went in to see how everyone was doing.

I braced myself in case I found any dead babies - something you never want to find, but always must expect.  Happily, the babies were all up and doing fine.  There were twelve in all, three boys and nine girls!  As I checked them each over, Ruby gave a few final pushes and delivered the last of the placenta.  I had missed all of the births, but only by minutes.  Oh well, my animals seem to like their privacy when giving birth (I don't blame them) and as a farmer friend of mine once noted, I'm luckier to have animals that can give birth without aid or intervention than to have ones that end up in complications.  It's some consolation, but I REALLY wanted to see the birth.

The babies ranged in size from under a pound to about two pounds.  They looked like little chihuahua puppies.  Some of the smaller ones fit almost entirely in my hand.  Imagine, in just six months these babies will weigh close to three hundred pounds.  Guess I'd better get my snuggling in while I can.

After I got the kids off to school, I went out to do some basic clean up.  I used a pitchfork to remove the placentas out of the pen.  As horrible as it sounds, the chickens thought that I had sent them mana from heaven when I shovelled it out of the fence and they were able to access it.  Gross chickens.  I then took a pair of scissors and clipped any of the umbilical cords that were longer than about two inches.  A couple of the babies had cords over ten inches long still attached and were catching their tethers under other babies and getting very upset.  Momma was tolerant of my presence, although she didn't like it much if I held a baby long enough to make it squeal.  She would bark and growl at me, letting me know that she was the one in charge, not me.  I respected that and it was all good.

Later in the day, I checked on the babies again.  One of the girls must've been stepped on as she had about a two inch laceration on her hind leg.  It was on the inside of the knee and was pretty deep.  I sprayed it with Blu-Kote but figured we'd need to do more later.  All the other babies were doing fine.  There were three babies that were obviously smaller than the rest.  These three runts looked like they might need a little extra, so I plan to try to supplement their meals with a bottle of rice cereal and milk.  I did help them all to latch when momma rolled over, but it's pretty hard to manage twelve hungry snouts all searching for food at the same time.  And BOY do they have sharp teeth.  We will be clipping their needle teeth soon so avoid problems with nursing.  If we don't, they babies may bite momma so much that she gives up feeding them altogether.  I don't blame her.

This evening, J and I went out to give the babies their booster of iron supplement.  Pigs are born with an iron deficiency and while pig milk is supposed to be almost the perfect food, it is low in iron.  I wanted to find the injectable kind, but settled for the oral iron.  2 ml per baby and nobody liked it.  By the end, all the babies had rust-colored slobber and J and I were covered in the stuff.  It suggests repeating this at 7 days, but I think we'll skip it on most of the babies.  Maybe just the tiny ones.

Waiting for Piglets

Ruby is due to farrow (have piglets) any day now.  We actually thought that she would have them this past weekend, but she did not.  She has a huge round belly and is obviously uncomfortable, but no other signs of impending birth.

I have spent the past two nights (and days) checking on her about every hour.  I don't think that she will need my help, especially since she is more experienced in birthing piglets than I, but I want to be there for moral support.  Watching her move around her pen brings back memories of those last few hours before giving birth and I can't help but feel for her.

She spends her days lounging in her mud pool, drinking copious amounts of water, and sleeping in her now completed shelter.  I am hoping that as the weather cools this week, she will be more comfortable.  But at the same time, I am hoping that she delivers before too long.  This waiting is killing me.

We anticipate a fairly large litter.  The last litter Ruby had included fifteen piglets, twelve of which survived.  There were some problems with her not producing enough milk - only four of her teats "worked."  I think that this may have been due to malnutrition.  She was bought from someone who fed her only bread and citrus...not a diet that will keep a pig healthy.  We have had her on good grain feed for the duration of this pregnacy and it already looks like she has milk swelling in most, if not all, of her teats.

I went to the feed store yesterday and bought a bottle of oral iron solution.  Piglets tend to be anemic when born and while I wanted to use an injectable (the feed store didn't have any), the oral equivalent will work just fine.  We have also been keeping Ruby on a free choice grain diet for the past few days.  We want to make sure that she has all of the energy she needs to bring these babies into the world.

Pig Shelter

The pig shelter is most of the way completed.  It is such a work of art.  J did a wonderful job designing it (in his head, no less) and bringing it to fruition.  And all for a pretty reasonable price (about $200).

The shelter is built on six 4x4 posts that are concreted into the ground.  It peaks in the center so that you can stand comfortably inside.  The trusses are all custom cut and are braced all the way across.  The sides are framed with 2x4s on the inside to withstand the pressure of an itchy pig.  The outside and roof is done with corrugated sheet metal (something we already had here on the ranch).

There are two doors on the entry side.  One door is meant to access the piglet side, the other door is meant to access the momma side.  Inside, we will have a grill that allows the piglets to run from side to side, but not the momma.  This is mainly so that the piglets can scurry out of the way when Ruby decides to lie down.  One of the most common ways to lose a piglet is due to a mother crushing one when lying down.  We haven't put this in yet, but will eventually add it.  We stopped working on it when the outer shell was complete because Ruby seemed insistent that we stop.  Her barking and growling was not conducive to finish work.

Ruby seems to have adopted the "piglet" side of the shelter at the moment, but she has free reign of the whole thing.  And she looks like she's content to wander in and out of it.  Now I just need J to build another one for the goats, and a modified version for Jaws.

Oh, and we need another chicken coop and a horse shelter...

Party Crashers

I'm not sure what to make of this.  The deer have found my garden, but don't seem to be eating it as much as they are trampling it.  It looks as if they are practicing the two-step throughout the tomatoes.  Yes, they are munching on the tops of the plants, but if that were all they did, we could live happily together.  But when I come out in the morning to find the limbs on my plants broken and the green fruit snapped off its vine, I am not a happy co-habiter.

I have resigned myself to the fact that there isn't much to be done.  We are so close to the end of the growing season here that building a deer fence would be silly.  And while they seem to snack on the carrot and beet tops, they aren't touching any other plants.  I'm kindof surprised that they haven't been eating the corn as I know my goats would be happy to lay waste to the corn rows if given half a chance.

In addition to deer issues, the moles have been systematically attacking my potato plants.  Again, if I could modify their behavior, we might be able to live together.  But rather than eat all of the potatoes off of a single plant and then moving to the next, I find that the moles like to taste each and every potato on several plants.  While I might be willing to simply cut the gnawed sections off and still eat the potatoes, I certainly cannot sell partially eaten potatoes to my customers.  Thus, I am left with dozens of wasted potatoes scattered throughout the rows.  My only consolation is that they will likely grown new potatoes for me next year (after we till them under).  Of course, I hadn't planned to keep the potatoes in the same spot so this might not be a benefit.

The corn is doing wonderfully.  We have enjoyed many dinners with corn on the cob.  The cobs are only about 8 inches long and not nearly as wide as the store bought varieties, but they are so sweet you easily forgive their size.  We have lots and lots of ears growing.  I hope to let them all grow until the first hard frost, then pick them all and process them for the freezer.  Until then, we pick them as we eat them.  Yum.

The squash is doing pretty well.  We have had a fair amount of zucchini and crookneck.  There are two acorn squash that I have seen on one plant, and a single delicata plant is doing its darnedest to give a bushel of its winter sweetness.  There are probably a half dozen squash on this one plant.

The cucumbers didn't ever do well.  They died in the first frost of the season - one that didn't hurt the tomatoes, but killed some of the smaller squash.  So no more cucumbers.  I think we got a total of four from the whole lot.

The beets are still small.  I think they just don't grow as well in the heat.  The first batch (early in May and June) were great.  These last ones still have a wonderful flavor, but they are smaller than a golf ball and hardly anything is left after you peel them.

The carrots are doing well...those that aren't "topped" by our resident vegetarians (rabbits and deer).  Some of them are actually 8-10 inches long.  And they have a very nice flavor.  I think I will plant this same variety again next year.

The onions are struggling against what I can only guess to be "neck rot."  Several of the onions are rotting right at the neckline.  When I pull the onion, sometimes the rot has travelled down the layers through the entire bulb.  If I remove the rotted layer, the rest of the onion is wonderful.  But it isn't the easiest thing to do, and often it leaves a smaller onion than I would like to sell.  It seems random as to which onions have this rot and which don't.  I have many that are growing just fine.  And while they are yellow onions, they are so sweet...almost as sweet as a Walla Walla.

The beans are climbing the trellis.  I think we may end up with a few beans.  I planted them so late, I am surprised to see anything from them.  Next year I will be better about getting them in the ground early.  I also think I will plant both pole and bush beans.  I have been told that the bush varieties tend to have a shorter time to harvest...that is a good thing where we live.