It’s a little strange when you see the same thing every day, you just don’t notice it changing. This is especially true of nature which is constantly changing but usually too slowly to notice. This seemed to be the case for the pigs.

Actually, the changes should have been obvious, as they have been going through over 2kgs of pig food in addition to food scraps every day. Anyway, I measured them recently. I’m sure it would be nigh on impossible to put them on scales but you can get a rough approximation by measuring their length and girth. My rough calculations came out at over 60kgs each. Boy have they grown!

So now the 60kg beasts have decided they are big enough to flex a bit of muscle, especially if their carers are a bit late with dinner. And that is what happened the other day. Dinner was late and so they decided to go after it themselves. The fence stood no chance and Jackie was soon screaming, “The pigs are out! the pigs are out!” Fortunately I had the food bucket to hand and they were soon chasing me back into their field. While they chowed down I made the necessary repairs (fingers crossed).

We won’t be late with dinner time again I can assure you.

Meanwhile, they still enjoy a bathe and as temperatures have risen into the thirties recently, here they are enjoying life.

Not just the pigs, but other things have been sprouting and after a few years of famine, last year’s pruning seems to have done the job with the apples and very soon, the peaches. So we are presently enjoying quite a few apple crumbles and apple and sultana cakes (recipe to follow as it is seriously delicious).

Following on from the last post, I got 7kgs of honey (that’s 14 jars) from just 4 frames in one hive. I can take another 4 full frames out of the same hive but I think I’ll leave that for a few weeks to enable them to recover a bit. I think I’ll leave hive number 2 this time around – they should make enough honey to last themselves over the winter but I won’t take any.

As I don’t have an extractor, as I described in the last post, I had to cut up the comb to let the honey drip out (a proper extractor just takes the honey and leaves the comb intact). But this had the advantage that I could use all the wax myself and after a bit of  reheating and filtering (through a pair of tights), I managed to get over 500g of pure beeswax. We just need to decide what to do with it now. We’re going to try and make candles but need to do a bit of research first.