Category: Farm/Country Living

Last Chance for Pastured Pork!

You, too, can have mouth-watering pastured pork if you get your order in by August 14.

Our six little piggies have become six big piggies and they’re going to make the big transition from “pigs” to “pork” next week. I don’t know if you’ve ever had pastured pork or not. It’s wonderful — our favorite meat. Lean bacon, mouth-watering pork chops … I’m not kidding, it’s impossible to overstate the quality of range-reared pork.

Our pigs are fed high-grade feed as well as pasture, featuring a daily feeding of cracked or otherwise unsaleable free-range eggs. They are happy outdoor pigs — a little too happy, since they keep escaping and making cheerful ambles around the neighborhood. They’re at the right weight now and have been in sparkling good health since day one.

Our pigs are slaughtered on the pasture by the area’s best butcher, “The Farmer’s Helper” of Harrisburg, Oregon. They never know what hits them: one moment they’re here, the next, they’re gone. On-field butchering means that they aren’t distressed by a truck ride before slaughter.

We sell pork by the half-pig, cut and cured to your specifications by The Farmer’s Helper. If you aren’t certain about that step, don’t worry — they’ll walk you through it.

But you have to place your order with us by August 14.

For more information, contact Karen at karen@plamondon.com or call her at 541-740-0612.

Free Ball-Point Pens: A Lesson in Bad Advertising

A while ago, Staples had a promotion that entitled me to a box of fifty ball-point pens. So I took them up on it and soon I had these pens all over my house. The only problem is, they don’t write. Okay, sometimes they write, but not often, and not for long. They don’t like some kinds of paper and they tend to just balk for no reason.

Now, I’m not stupid, and that means that I’m going to avoid Staples store brands for the rest of my life. From now on, every time I try to use a pen that doesn’t work, I will think of Staples. Even if the pen is someone else’s! In spite of many positive experiences over the years, they’ve convinced me that their company is run by the kind of morons who are happy to put their name on junk.

So I ordered a box of Bic Round Stic pens from Amazon.com, which is where I’m doing all my shopping these days because of Amazon Prime, which give me “free” second-day shipping if I pay $79 a year. I already bought enough stuff on Amazon that I’d save money on the deal, but it’s pretty wild that now I can buy a lens cap of a box of pens and have free shipping. I live in the country, and a trip into town is time-consuming. Hooray for mail-order!

But back to my story. So my Bic pens came in, and on the side of the box was the following statement: “Quality Promise: Bic Does Not Make Store Brands.”

What does this mean? I think it means that Staples is not the only group of idiots in charge of advertising and promotion, and that many, many companies are dissipating their customers’ goodwill by handing out inferior pens with their name on it. Why not put your competitor’s names on crummy pens, you dimwits! Or maybe pay the extra two cents and get a pen that writes.

Bic, on the other hand, makes a good-though-unpretentious pen that lives up to its motto of, “Writes first time, every time.” If I pick up a Bic pen that’s been lying around with its cap off for a few years, it usually writes perfectly. And on their boxes, they go to the trouble of distancing themselves from their so-called competition. If you buy a pen that doesn’t say “Bic” on it, they imply, you’re asking for trouble. Fair enough.

Sometimes people ask me about competition, and my answer is always, “What competition?” I think you can see why. Hardly anyone has Bic’s good sense. They’re mostly like Staples.

The Glove Trick for Clean Water

My livestock water is pumped out of a brook that have the usual kinds of crud in it — bits of plant matter, bugs, silt, etc. These tend to clog livestock waterers and also the foot valve at the bottom of the inlet pipe. Sure, the foot valve is screened, sort of, but the screen is too coarse, and sometimes I have to pull the twigs and crud out of it.

So I got tired of this and looked for a finer screen. My eyes fell on an old orange string glove. Bingo! I pulled it over the foot valve and held it on with a zip tie. The water is running cleaner and the foot valve probably won’t clog for a year.

This is probably the weirdest improvised repair I’ll do all year.

Update, August 15, 2009: The glove clogged with silt and I removed it. It didn’t look a lot different when clogged, so I’m going to replace it with something that looks a lot different when clogged — window screening, perhaps. It sure worked while it lasted, though!

Outsmarting Pastured Pigs When Moving the Fence

Grass-fed pigs at Norton Creek Farm

Our six pastured pigs are getting awfully big, and they have minds of their own. Every few days, Karen has to move their electric fence to give them access to a new swath of pasture, since grass-fed pork is the name of the game here. Once the fence is off, they can escape if they want to. They’ve done it before. How can you deal with this problem?

I was out mowing and I watched Karen work her magic. She had a trick all worked out: the pigs were hungry. They look to her for food. So their first impulse is to follow her around, not to leave and go foraging on their own. As she worked, she’d pause once in a while to fetch a few hard-boiled eggs from the pickup, and give these to the pigs. This kept them close at hand and totally under her control until she was done. Then she gave them the last of the eggs, stepped over the fence, turned on the juice, and was gone. A job well done!

A feed bucket can do more than any amount of yelling or pleading.

By the way, we take all our cracked or otherwise unsalable eggs and hard-boil them for the pigs. During the off-season, when we have no pigs, we fill up a chest freezer with hard-boiled eggs. Pigs will gladly eat frozen eggs, shell and all. If the eggs are stuck to the carton, which they usually are after having been frozen, we feed them carton and all. The pigs have nothing but time, and will happily separate the eggs from the carton on their own.

Grass-fed, egg-fed, pastured pork is like nothing you can find in the store. Feel free to envy us.

July Newsletter is Out

My July Newsletter has just been emailed. If you’re not a subscriber, you might consider joining (near the top right corner of the page here). Topics include quality in produce and pastured pigs.

It’s raining here today — unusual in an Oregon summer. But the chickens don’t mind very much. It’ll help keep the grass green, which is good, because the chickens won’t eat it once it starts to brown off.