Roughly ten months ago we embarked on a new journey into pig ownership. Our first gardening attempt on our new farm quickly turned into a colossal failure. Our chosen garden spot had been a well fertilized cattle pasture for twenty years. The rough winter turned into a wet spring, and an even wetter early summer. Then drought hit, and the few veggies that had survived the tremendous weed growth during the flood finally gave up. We were left with a horribly embarrassing garden full of weeds and dead plants. About this time I stumbled upon Hank Will’s article on plowing with pigs. He had wrote about his experience tilling and plowing his garden area with heritage hogs. The idea stayed with us, and we began researching hog breeds and looking for nearby breeders.

Within a month we found a local breeder of Poland China, Chester, and Yorkshire hogs. Our initial purchase of two piglets got us started, but we had four gardens plus a melon patch to weed! Our two became four and then six, and thus our journey into plowing with pigs began. For more details on our garden plowing experience, check out our previous blog titled “Pig Power! Using Pigs to Prepare a Garden.” Below you see our first two piglets, Bacon (gilt) and Pork Chop (barrow).

Our gardens are now growing beautifully, with very few weeds to deal with. Another benefit to using this method is the free fertilizer and composting material that gets worked into the soil by the pigs feet. Straw bedding and manure make for excellent soil after a few months of being trampled under pig feet! Below you can see just how bad the garden area was. Just a few short months with pigs on it and it is hard to believe the difference!  

Here we are just three months after putting the piglets in the garden.

Last month Andrew and I were lamenting about how over grown our wooded area behind the house had become. When we first viewed the property two years ago, it was very park like and pretty after years of cattle grazing away at the undergrowth. Since the previous owner removed the cattle before our purchase, it has sat vacant without being tended to. This 3.5 acre section of land sits directly behind our home, and separates us from our hay field. However it is the first thing you see when you park in the drive, or look out any of our western facing windows. How nice it would be to see a clean and tidy space! Our plan has always been to clean it up by removing the numerous dead trees and underbrush, fill in parts of the shallow ravine that run through the center, and sow it in pasture grass to make it a workable piece of land. Unfortunately, there are several fallen trees, tree stumps, and holes hidden by the undergrowth that made it nearly impossible to tend to with a tractor for fear of damaging something.

In February we took our two barrows to slaughter, leaving us with a trio of girls and one boar. Our four breeding piglets now all grown up, were still occupying parts of our garden area. On this particular day, we were also discussing just what to do with the pigs since we needed to plant the gardens. The best solution it seemed to both of our problems was a new plowing adventure! Why not turn the pigs onto the wooded area, and let them clear all the underbrush for us? Then we could come along to cut the dead trees and remove the stumps without having to wade through a sea of waist high weeds and brush to do so.

As you can see, our wooded area had gotten quit grown up. The worse part was the thistles, poison oak, and the ravine (more of a deep ditch really). I have read that some pigs can develop allergic reactions to poison oak, much like a human. I worried that our pigs may have problems with this as literally every tree trunk in site seemed to have fallen victim to the climbing vines. 

We already had an electric fence box that had been running our fencing around the garden areas for the pigs, as well as the remainder of a roll of electric wire. So all that was needed now was more step-in posts. Off to Tractor Supply we went, we purchased 45 step-in electric fence posts four foot tall. We also needed another 7 t-posts to secure the corners. The new pig pens are not equally divided. Instead, one side is roughly 2/3 the size of the other and both are in a triangular pattern to follow the lay of the land instead of in common square or rectangular dimensions. That is the beauty of temporary electric fencing, it is much more easy to follow the lay of the land than permanent fencing does. How many times have you spent hours trying to find a good way to enclose a ravine using wood posts and woven wire? It is very difficult to do so accurately enough to contain pigs. Not the case with electric! The entire system took in 1.3 acres and was up in a single afternoon. 

Now going back to the design, why did we not make equally sized pens? Well Bacon (my parents gilt) and Boss Hog (our boar) are the oldest of the bunch. They were bred three months ago. So we should soon have our very first litter of piglets! Bacon is growing quit large, and needed her own space to prepare for her piglets. So we have Daisy Duke, Ellie Mae and Boss in the larger section and Bacon alone in the smaller side. When Bacon’s litter is near weaning age, we will move them into the “common area” and move Ellie Mae into the smaller section. She was bred in April and will deliver our first litter of registered Poland China’s. Daisy Duke, the smallest and youngest of our girls, will take her turn soon after Ellie.

Now that the pigs were moved, we had a problem. While our DIY pig shelters constructed with t-posts, two stock panels, and a large tarp were perfectly adequate for just hogs, they didn’t make for safe or secure furrowing areas. I hit the internet in search of the ideal furrowing arrangement for a pasture based system. We do not want to contain any of our livestock in stalls or man made shelters. Instead, we choose to allow them to graze freely and grow naturally outdoors. We ran across a company selling “Port A Huts” and found a dealer a few hours away from us in Lafayette, TN. Andrew drove down to pick up a small hut with pig rails. The pig rails are designed to give the piglets a little space between the Momma pig and the wall to prevent piglet deaths from being laid on. These huts are specially designed to be durable, light weight, and easily mobile for relocation from pen to pen. Perfect for our operation! Port-A-Hut farrowing pen is pictured above in Bacons pen.

So here we have Bacon set up in her new wooded pen with her Port A Hut. She’s a very happy porker now! We have her situated just inside a grove of trees, easily visible from our kitchen window. This way, I will easily be able to watch her and our first litter of piglets!

As for Boss, Daisy and Ellie they will still have their DIY stock panel shelter. Not that they use it, they have been much happier lounging under the trees even during rain storms and heat waves. They seem much happier in the woods than they were in the garden. All the trees make wonderful scratching posts, and their mud holes they have already wallowed out last much longer in the shade than they did in the garden areas.

The pigs have now been in their wood pens for nearly four weeks. It only took about a week for the trio to root up nearly the entire pen. I was surprised at how quickly they did this, and to see that they did not eat what they rooted. They reminded me of steam rollers going as quickly as possible destroying everything in site. However, I was more surprised to watch their behavior after this initial demolition. After first knocking down all of the brush, scraggly shrubs, and large undergrowth they attacked the weeds and what little grass there was growing. When this was done, they stopped rooting the entire area and began selectively rooting around areas where they dug their mud holes and an area to bed down at night. With this accomplished, they continued rooting around the outer most sections of the pen while leaving the center alone. After that initial week of rooting, grass began growing back in the center of the pen. They have not continued to root in this area, instead they now graze on the grass there while keeping the remainder of the pen rooted clean. 

In just a few short weeks this area has gone from an over grown mess to a clean and clear work space. Now you can clearly see every stump and fallen limb, and the dead trees are easily accessible by tractor. Better still, the ravine that previously ran through the center of the large pen is now just a shallow dip thanks to our four legged wonders.

Here are a few pairs of shots for comparison. Each pair shows the area before the pigs moved in, and the other three weeks after the pigs. 

Shot 1:  Before and After
 

Shot 2 Before and After 

Here you can see all four pigs that make up our current plowing team. Bacon in the forefront in her pen, and Boss, Ellie, and Daisy in the background.

Boss, Ellie, and Daisy are very friendly. They come to you immediantly when they see or hear you expecting treats.

We will leave the pigs in their current location for several more weeks before moving them. At that time, we will rotate them to the neighboring 1/3 acre section of the wooded area. Our plan is to separate this area into three rotations with our last rotation being completed at the end of summer. As the pigs are moved off of one section and in to another, we will come in behind them with the tractor and pull up stumps then cut up dead trees and sow seasonal grasses. Hopefully by next spring our rough woodland will resemble a new and improved park like setting!

Here we have their next plowing project, the adjacent 1.3 acres.

Once Fall arrives, we will leave our breeding stock in the woods. Our plan is to keep a pair of piglets from this summers litters to move onto the gardens for fall “plowing.” In this way, we hope to always have breeder pigs in the woods, feed pigs in the garden and then in the freezer, and a healthy and bountiful garden grown with natural (and free!) fertilizer. Eventually we hope to use this same system for the woods on the back of our property to truly make the entire farm clean and productive. 

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The time has finally arrived! It is time to see just how well those pigs worked all year long. As you can see, when we moved the pigs off the garden area it was completely devoid of any weed vegetation. Go pigs!

Several weeks ago, Andrew got our smallest garden and what we call Garden #1 (shown above) worked up. We set out in a whirlwind to plant before the pending thunderstorms arrived. We finished under the cover of darkness, with only a shop light hung from a pole to light our way. In our haste, I didn’t have time to sit and plan out exactly what I wanted to plant where in our four gardens this year. Last year, I spent several days with a sketch pad, ruler, and pencils mapping out where each different veggie would go. This year, with the baby and bizarre weather creating an almost impossible gardening situation for us, we are doing good just to get things in the ground!

So, in that first planting we filled up our smallest garden which we call the melon patch. Last year, we had it full of watermelon. This year it is home to shallots, garlic, horseradish, cabbage, Kennebec potatoes and red, yellow, and white onions. We then moved into Garden #1 where we planted red Pontiac potatoes. Shortly after getting these rows done, it began to rain and didn’t stop for three days!

Two weeks later, we put in a few rows of purple bush beans, sweet corn, sweet pie pumpkins, four varieties of tomatoes, three kinds of bell peppers, green bush beans, cayenne pepper, banana pepper, pickling cucumbers, and zucchini squash. This pretty much filled up that garden, with only one corner left to plant some watermelon which we saved for today since it is warmer.

This past week we found ourselves with a long stretch of pretty weather. Andrew has just recently moved Boss, Bacon, and Ellie Mae off of Garden #2 and into the woods where they will be living until garden season is over. He then took Daisy Duke out of Garden #3 and moved her in with Boss and Ellie Mae, putting Bacon in a section by herself while we wait for her to furrow. So now we had two vacant gardens, and no plan!

I pulled out all of my remaining seeds and set to work. Since we did not plan out all of our gardens before we began as we usually do, there was an issue of making sure different varieties were far enough apart to not cross. In the past, I have pretty much grown only one kind of corn, bean, and squash. With the exception of squash and zucchini, which I always put at opposite ends of the garden. We usually only grow pickling cucumbers, and ever so often try some cantaloupe. So cross pollination hasn’t really been an issue for us before. I have heard all the “old timers” talk about the year they grew those pumpkins to close to the watermelon, or when the squash tasted like pumpkin and the cucumber fruit grew colored and misshapen. Since neither of us were really sure what would cross and what wouldn’t, it was time to do a little research.

The first thing I learned was the rumors of waterloupes and pucumbers is false. It is not possible for watermelon to cross with cantaloupes, or pumpkins with cucumbers. And even if they did, you would not notice it. Or at least not this year. Instead, you would see a difference in the fruit produced from the vines grown from cross pollinated seeds from the previous year. This is true regardless of the plant type. Beans, melons, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, they all can be cross-pollinated to produce a modified crop next season. The only vegetable that does not hold true to this is corn, if corn is cross-pollinated then it can produce crossed ears of corn the same year. Meaning, if you have a white corn that crosses with a yellow corn, you may have ears with a mixture of both white and yellow kernels in the same season.

So if you do not plan on saving seeds from your garden to use next year, breath a sigh of relief! You have no worries of cross pollination. However, if you are like us and want to save your garden seeds to use next year then here are a few pointers to ensure you can do so safely.

Know your names! Does KPCOFGS sound familiar? Think back to high school science and you may remember King Phillip Came Over For Good Spaghetti, an acronym used to remember Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family Genus, and Species. Many common vegetables share the same genus. Zucchini, squash and patty pans are all members of the Cucurbita genus, as are butternut squash and most pumpkins. However, zucchini, yellow squash, and patty pans are in a different species than butternut squash and most pumpkins. Therefore, a zucchini can not cross with a butternut squash, and a howden pumpkin can not cross with a patty pan. However, a zucchini and a yellow squash can cross since they are both members of the same species.

Now going back to the little old women talking about their bitter cucumbers… while their cucumbers may have been bitter, it was not a result of any cross with a squash or pumpkin. All slicing and pickling cucumbers are classified as Cucumis sativus. Squash is a Cucurbita pepo and pumpkins (depending on variety) fall under Cucurbita pepo and Cucurbita moschata. They are simply not compatible!

Here is a little cheat sheet to help clarify what exactly will, and will NOT cross:

1. Cucurbita pepo               Straight and Crook neck squash,zucchini, patty pans, and sugar pumpkins

2. Cucurbita moschata      Most other pumpkins, butternut squash

3. Cucumis sativus            All slicing and all pickling cucumbers

4. Cucumis melo               All muskmelons, canteloupe, honeydew melons

5. Citrullus lanatis             All watermelons 

Any two vegetables on the same line will cross, if they aren’t they won’t! Take caution to check the genus and species of your pumpkins though, as the fall into two different groups depending on variety. 

Beans are another easily crossed, and widely misunderstood vegetable. There are many different types and colors of beans ranging from the most common green beans and limas to more exotic types such as purple bush beans and speckled runners. Again, we can look at the genus and species of each type of bean and tell whither or not they will cross pollinate.

1. Phaseolus vulgaris          Kidney beans, green beans, black beans, cranberry beans, pinto beans

2. Phaseolus lunatus           Lima beans and butter beans

3. Phaseolus Coccineus     Scarlet Runner beans

Other garden vegetables such as tomatoes and peppers can also cross with other varieties, however there is no 100% sure way of keeping them from crossing with other varieties planted nearby. There are several ways though of reducing your risk of cross pollination. 

1. Plant plants of different varieties at a minimum distance of 25 foot apart. Spacing at 50 foot is recommended. Planting varieties at 25 foot or more apart reduces the chance of cross pollination to around 5%. 

2. Stagger your planting schedule so no two varieties of the same species will be flowering and fruiting at the same time. 

3. Plant barrier plants that have pollen between rows of tomatoes to lessen the chance of bees flying directly from one tomato to another. 

4. Use physical barriers (such as bagging) to enclose flowers completely. This will require hand fertilization. 

If you are determined to save seed from a precious family heirloom that is not crossed, you may want to simply grow one variety this year. Remember that cross pollination is possible (however unlikely) if any other plants of the same species are grown within a ½ mile radius!

Armed with our new found knowledge of plant species and pollination, we now have three of our gardens planted! We have watermelon, pickling cucumbers, and zucchini spread out in our first garden. Garden #2 contains patty pan squash, yellow squash, canteloupes and slicing cucumbers in various locations. Garden #1 has green bush beans and purple pole beans while Garden #2 has runner beans, Dixie speckled butter peas, and speckled lima beans. Mixed among those varieties are a wide assortment of other garden veggies. Look for further updates as gardening season progresses.

Good luck with your own garden!

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