• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 388 0

rake reel was a marvelous thing to watch as it spun counter to the direction of travel, the polished steel tine tips dancing in staccato flashes along the stubble line before swooping up and away around their oval orbit. Just ahead of the flickering blur the flat swath of dried hay rose and curled into itself like a wave angling for the beach, rolled over several times, then tumbled out to lie still in a fat unbroken rope. Sometimes a gust of wind would unroll the windrow and lay it flat again. Mostly you just went round and round and round. Jerry had mounted a suicide knob on the steering wheel, so when you got to a tight corner you could cramp that front end around right tight, then just turn loose and pull your chin back clear of the knob while the wheel spun back to straightaway. When I raked the back swath (we’d often wait an extra day or two as it was shaded and dried more slowly) I had to keep an eye out for tree limbs overhead because the John Deere rode so much higher than the Massey and the exhaust pipe stuck straight up in the air. (When the tractor wasn’t in use, we capped the exhaust with a tin can—if the engine fired just right on start-up, the can would pop ten feet high.)

When the raking was done, it was home for lunch, and then the baling.

Still no chickens, but we’ve had the pigs for about a month. The passage of time has been marked by the daily evolution of the stunning subcutaneous rainbow chewed into my gluteus maximus by the frenzied coon dog. Lately the colors have moderated so it appears a thundercloud has parked on my butt. Like a remarkable version of Tom Sawyer’s toe, this butt-bite is the sort of thing you just itch to show someone. I maintain my propriety, but have held the photographs in reserve and will make them available at auction should archivists of the proper caliber express interest and promise to keep everything high-tone.

Morning now breaks with the lids of the pig feeder banging. The racket reminds me the farm is alive, if only in that little corner. And it’s nice to know they’re down there fattening themselves up. Still, with each bang I realize it’s a meter ticking on the feed bill, so we’ve been throwing everything we can at them food-wise. All of our table scraps, of course, but also green apples, dandelions, venison trimmings, and cleaned fish.

There is a profusion of wild grapes on our little farm. The vines wrap themselves around anything that stands still. The pigs are currently penned at the far end of an old overgrown paddock and concrete bunk feeder remaining from the days when this place was a going concern of a dairy farm. I’d like to expand the pigpen boundaries into the paddock later in the year, so I’ve been cutting back the grapevines a little each day. Having seen how they went for the nettles, I thought it worth a try to sling some of the vines in with the pigs. They went nuts, stripping the leaves off and chomping them down. So now every day I throw big armfuls in their pen and they snuffle right in there, ripping the leaves free and chomping happily, stopping only to fight with each other. The little female pig is forever nipping the boy pig on the ear and running him off from the best leaves and slop. I’d feel sorry for him except he’s bigger than she is.

The only thing the pigs like better than grape leaves is pigweed (I grew up calling it lamb’s quarters). It grows big and is easy to pull if the ground is moist, so it doesn’t take long to collect a good bundle. They devour the stuff. We throw all our garden weeds in the pigpen. They snuffle through the quack and ignore the foxtail, but pouting their lower lips delicately, they worry out every last leaf of pigweed.

We got the idea to graze our pigs from reading Gene Logsdon’s excellent All Flesh Is Grass. Gene makes the point that pigs were meant to grub and forage, and we’re gonna test him on it. I do not know how he feels about feeding pigs grape leaves. In short, they will eat pretty much anything, but can be capriciously finicky. After weeks of gobbling every nettle I pitched across the fence,