So about the moving. The couple next door moved out and since the landlord owns the three houses on this street, we asked if we could move in there. It is the last house on the road and backs up to the "Lake" and the swamp area that surrounds it. The house we are in now also backs up to the "Lake", but the bunch of nothing behind this house is much smaller than the bunch of nothing that is behind THAT house. We'll have a total of about 2.75 acres with about 1.5 usable (non-swamp land). The rest is swamp or will have to be seriously cleared. I like the land, though, because everything from the house to the back of the property is covered by great big Live Oak trees. The only part that doesn't have trees is the (roughly) 1/4 acre front yard. Which is where we will be growing our alfalfa and corn to feed our pig. Plus, I'm getting chickens. The house has a small fenced in area off of the back porch that the previous tenant made using chain link fencing and buried telephone poles around the perimeter to keep their dogs in. They were diggers so they had to come up with a way to keep them in. So it should work out perfectly for the pig when it's little, then as it becomes older (and smellier) it will move out back to an area that is half built now with a shaded area that used to be the horse paddock. We will reinforce that with "hog panels" and make that the "big pig" area. Add a little extra fenced area and he will have plenty of room. That's where the pigs will (oops, sorry pig - no "s") will be until they (I mean he or she) are (I mean is) big enough to be magically turned into bacon. Translation: The cute little piglet starts to become a pain, we then banish him to the area where we don't have to see him every time we walk out the back door. He takes care of the feeding and care. Then, one day we get another cute little piggy in the side pen. Sometime during that time period, we get a freezer full of meat. Viola! Pig farming!
The chickens are strictly for eggs and pest control. We need something to help control the bugs that thrive in the swamp (and maybe those hornworms that we had such a problem with in our garden last year.) We haven't gotten the chicken coop worked out yet, but we are thinking about making one that is on wheels so they can be moved from area to area around the property so they don't exhaust the resources in any one place. I personally will be setting them free once in a while to let them roam the yard since, as my friend who has chickens says - and Mom always used to say "chickens always come home to roost". So, the idea is that once they get used to their roost, I let them out during the day, they eat the bugs and stuff (and what we feed them) scratch up and aerate the soil around the place and they go back into their roost at night, where we close them in securely away from coyotes and such. I'll let you know how that works.
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