Pigs, Gourds, and Wikis

I've been meaning to explain the name of my blog for some time now. It may seem like a very strange name, given the focus on all things EPUB lately. I mean to write about the other parts of the pigs, gourds, and wikis triad, really I do. You see, I live on a farm, and we raise chickens, sheep, cows, and an occasional pig, though there are no pigs this year since we're about to move to Barcelona for a spell. We have had as many as 75 chickens at once (50 for meat and 25 laying hens), and this year we got our first calf, Julieta.

That means we're milking once a day (and letting Julieta do the evening shift). Though “we” is a misnomer, since I've been holed up in my office tending to the “wikis” part of my life pretty steadily for the last four or five months.

The gourds piece is the part of me that loves to create things. When I started this blog, I was growing, drying, cleaning, carving, and painting gourds, not necessarily in that order. I had a short-lived run at selling them too, though that wasn't nearly as fun as making them. The problem is that now I have big boxes of beautiful, but neglected gourds. But on other days I've been known to sew, and to knit, to weave, to garden, to make crazy snowflakes out of origami paper, and to write web pages.

These days, however, all the focus seems to go to the wiki part of the trio. I'm busy writing a book on EPUB, or how to create electronic books that look especially good on the iPad and as good as possible on less graphic environments like the Barnes and Noble Nook, or even Adobe Digital Editions. Just for the record, “wikis” is more a metaphor than anything else, though I did create an exhaustive guide to iPhoto Book Themes using a wiki for structure.

Kiddie pool is perfect pig watering hole

Here was my problem: the pigs, who are right outside my office window, were constantly sticking their muddy hooves into the water bucket and dumping it over. I would watch, yell at them sometimes, and then end up going down to fill it up again. The book was never going to get done. In addition, the ground is so gravelly that the water we hosed in their yard to give them some relief from the (albeit very short) summer sun disappeared so fast that they barely got to take advantage of it.

Then I remembered the old kiddie pool that we picked up off the side of the road last year, ostensibly for Laika, who decided that although she has webbed feet, she really doesn't like getting wet all that much.

I pulled the pool into the pigpen. At first, the pigs only sniffed at it. But a few hours later, I caught them trying it out. They're frankly a bit unwieldy (ok, fat!) and they don't like the slide at all.  But they've gotten the hang of it pretty quickly... they climb in and out, they cool themselves off, they wallow.



Not only that, but their water bucket stays clean and upright.

How to cure a ham

We got to Barcelona this morning about noon. Our flight rather left New York about 3 hours late which made it pleasantly easy to fall asleep. I have never felt so rested, never been able to resist going to sleep during the day, but it is 11pm and I'm still pretty wide awake, though fading.

About 5 in the afternoon we went out for a snack and some emergency shopping (croquetas and olive oil to fry them in for dinner, nocilla (the Spanish version of Nutella) and cookies for breakfast, and fresh milk from the neighborhood dairy that had actual cows as recently as 1985. But first stop was the bakery/cafe where we got chocolate croissants and coffee... yum!



Next to the market, mostly for the croquetas, but we were completely sucked in by the gargantuan fresh peas at one

Pigs in the Garden

Well, I've got two other blog posts written in my mind, but since this is from today, I'm going to stop pretending I'm going to write the others first, and just write this.

This morning it snowed. DH was really crabby, threatening to move back to Barcelona. Sigh. As an old-time New Englander, I knew, as much as I knew every morning of my childhood when school wasn't canceled, that the snow would be gone by mid-afternoon. Even got a bet with a week without chores out of it. But I did get one picture before it had all melted away:



Meanwhile, the snow did make us realize that we had to move the pigs to the garden right away while there was still time for them to eat up all the weeds we had neglected to pull out during the summer. They didn't want to leave their original area. We set up a fenced corridor between the old place and the new but even when we removed the fence between the two areas, they wouldn't cross the line where the wire had been. I tried pushing them (yeah, right) and yelling at them, and offering them chunks of pumpkin and grain, but it wasn't until we walked away that they started following us.

When they finally made it all the way to the garden, DH reattached the wire across the border and in they were. The idea is that they'll wander about the garden, digging it up for next year, eating all the weed seeds in the process. It doesn't hurt that they're much closer to the water and the apple tree and the leftover pumpkins.



They're really getting fat!

Pigs love Whey

Down the road, there's a great CSA called Sangha Farm that makes yummy goat cheese. I asked them if I could have their whey for my pigs and they were kind enough to save me a bucketful. I finally gave it to the pigs yesterday and boy did they love it. They slurped it up.



Laika liked the whey too:


They didn't like it as much as grain, however. I found that out this morning when I gave them the other half. I only had two dishes, so I put grain in one and whey in the other. They fought over the grain. Once in a while the boy, who's at the bottom of their short hierarchy, would come over and sip some whey, but really he wanted grain too. So I dumped some extra on the ground. Then they were happy.

When we went back this afternoon, both the grain and the whey were all gone.

Welcome to my blog, did you bring food?

This is piggie #1:


My friend Nancy Bea came to visit recently and a frequent topic of conversation was "why wasn't I blogging". Honestly, I didn't have a very good answer. I'm always trying to write, always saying I want to write, always thinking of things to write. It seems like a good recipe for starting a blog. Only, what would I write about? And who would read it?

Right now on my mind there's this weird dichotomy between tech and non-tech. I go outside and weed way too many rows of beautiful gourds and pumpkins, or feed the pigs or the chickens, but all the while I'm thinking up new ways to create wikis for all my friends and relations. So, I'm hoping this blog will be a reflection of what in Barcelona they now call "neo-rurals": those folks who have left the city looking to reconnect with the land and our food and a simpler life, but who are still completely in love with technology and every last gadget they can drool over, if not actually have arrive on the next UPS truck.

So I hope I can use this space to write down tips about squash bugs and wiki farms, about Flickr and fencing. Mostly, I just hope I can use it to start writing.