The Value of Mailing Lists

I joined the mailing list for my local stockfeed supplier.  Every so often (and fortunately it’s not too often) he’ll send out an email with his latest specials.  Once in a while, though, there is an extra one that has animals for sale or to give away.

I got one of those yesterday.  A lady is moving from her small farm into town and the buyer doesn’t want her animals.  Most of them are much loved pets, so she didn’t want to sell them and risk having them not go to good homes.  I went round last night to have a look at her lovely 3 year old pedigree (with papers even) Kune kune boars - who must go together.  Darla needs company you see, and I’m still hoping to breed from her.  Kune pigs have the sweetest nature and are all round lovely pigs to have.

I also asked about her hens.  There were 17 free range hens.  All quite tame on the whole and mostly purebred (which doesn’t really bother me either way).  There were Sussex hens and Wyandottes and Barred Rocks and Araucanas.  I wasn’t sure how many we should get.  While we’ve built a rather large run for the chooks, I’m not sure if their house is big enough for 20 birds.  It would take some rearranging and more nesting boxes and another perch.  Hubby has suggested that we build a second chookhouse in the run for them.  There is certainly no harm in having more chooks.  We don’t want the roosters though.  One rooster is enough we believe and she has 3 purebred Wyandotte roosters.  They’re beautiful, but much bigger than our Howard.

So while we’re building another chookhouse, we also need to think about a better place to run these extra pigs.  Darla is probably a miniature Kune after seeing these boys and she is quite well behaved so I don’t mind having her running around the outside of the tunnel house.  But I can’t see the tunnel house walls keeping these two out if they wanted to get in - and I can’t see how I’d get them out easily once they were in.  We’re thinking about putting them under the trees in the woodlot.  There’s plenty of shade there, it would just need water and the macrocarpa branches that we dumped there to get them out of the cow’s paddock would need shifting.

We've been saying that we need to get more chooks and some company for Darla, but money is a little tight, especially with Christmas getting closer all the time - immediately followed for us by Master 14's birthday.

Some of the mailing lists might seem like a hassle and may seem to fill your email inbox with junk, but it’s worth keeping an eye on them.  You never know when something useful (like this) may pop up.