permaculture

[Lisa Rollens <rollens@fidnet.com>]

Just be cautious because when the cute little darling gets physically mature 
and comes in heat, she may tear the pen completely apart, electric wire and 
all, and goo visiting, or worse, on a feeding binge!  Guess how I know???

Lisa


On Oct 10, 2011, at 11:57 PM, Cory Brennan wrote:

> We set up a pig tractor this summer at Pine Ridge reservation, and it 
> worked great. The pig ate all the weeds except vervain, tilled the soil, 
> and replanted squash seeds and curly dock for us - when we noticed that, we 
> started feeding her stuff we wanted planted and that worked pretty good 
> too. We planted cover crops where she dug, and that worked good too, tho it 
> started getting too hot and dry, and with no irrigation, the pioneers we 
> didn't want (like goathead) were coming back in so we moved her back to a 
> permanent pen. But I would do that again in an instant to clear a field 
> rather than manually doing it. She worked really fast too - in only a few 
> days, her pen area would be cleared. We were using her to clear a fairly 
> large space for a food forest, but only got a small portion of it done. 
> What I will do next spring if we still have access to her is put some 
> composted manure and straw in the pen, let her dig that in while she eats 
> the weeds (she
> doesn't leave enough manure herself in the few days it takes her to eat 
> stuff, though there is some), then plant cover crop and nitro fixers as 
> soon as we move her. It would be a relatively labor free way of turning the 
> compacted clay pioneer soil into food forest material...
> 
> Cory 
> 
> 
> ________________________________