'Mornin' Pig! How's that bacon coming along?
The pigz are happy!
Them's some nice long pigz - the bacon is coming along just fine.
Check out how big they are. Remember when we first got them and they were so small? See the feeder and compare how big they are already! That's only been about a month ago that we moved them to their new spot.
And they are doing a great job of clearing their new area. The Impenetrable Forest has met its match.
In other news... we have a hatch going on! Charlie's eggs are finally hatching. I went down to the incubator and found 3 or 4 little pips trying to bust out of their pods... I mean, eggs. The bad news was that I took one of the pippers out to put under her momma...and I smelled a bad egg. When I gently lifted Charlie up I saw disaster. There was a couple of bad eggs and even worse - maggots.
So we sprung to action. We took the eggs out from under her and in a swift motion I picked her up and The Big Man scooped up all the bad gunk and hay. We quickly reformulated a new straw nest for her and sat her back down. We put some of her eggs back and also gave her the pippers. She immediately started talking to them. Hopefully she'll just assume those are her babies that have been under her the whole time. We'll sneak the rest of the incubator hatchlings under her later this afternoon if she accepts them.
We put the non-ruined eggs (as far as we could tell) into the incubator. This way they can have a chance and if they are bad (ruined from the bad eggs in the nest) they won't do much damage. There is always a chance that your hen could get infested with maggots if her nest goes bad. While I was holding her I turned her over and checked her skin - so far so good. Best practices would be to sprinkle some DE on her to kill off any mites or such - but since she's on eggs that are currently hatching we'll just let her be. In a few days I'll take some wood ashes in near her so she can get a dust bath in them.
Hopefully there will be pix of little cuties tomorrow. Anybody else hatching? Do you have the windows open and the air conditioning off? We do - such a relief!
Happy Wednesday!
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