Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes

by Rosie Boycott

  I feel sick: it is like having an article rejected or getting the sack. Does this mean Bonners won't sell our pork any more? I don't want to ask. Mr B senior is saying that we need to get some advice on how to rear our pigs and that we should ask David's uncle, Mr Sainsbury, who knows all about how to fatten pigs. He suggests that I call his son when he gets back from a short holiday in three days' time.

  After apologising profusely for our substandard pork, I leave the shop and bump into Charlie, who is walking along Silver Street towards the butcher's. I tell him what has happened and we go off to get coffee in the Meeting House at the other end of the town. Apart from Mr Bonner, a pig is also going to Rowley Leigh, chef of Kensington Place restaurant in London, and heaven knows what he will think of it. Clearly, we aren't going to get much money for the pigs and, even though the walled garden is now full of seeds, at least another two or three months are going to pass when we'll still be far below the break-even mark. For the last five months our polytunnels, which could have been producing salads, have stood largely empty, and ground where winter vegetables such as leeks and Brussels sprouts and sorrel could have been growing has been fallow. The pork disaster acts like a catalyst to open the floodgates of doubt. Is this all completely crazy? If David had been borrowing the money from a real bank, rather than from a couple of ignorant townies, would he have done things differently? If Charlie and I were borrowing the money from the bank and we'd promised the manager an injection of cash once the pigs were sold, we'd be sweating with anxiety. It is only six days ago that we sat down in the kitchen with David, assessing our financial prospects for the coming weeks. It looked promising: Dillington House owed us £1,100, Row­ley owed us £180, and the pigs would bring in at least £500. That would mean almost £1,800 into the account by the end of March, and on 1 April it's the farmers' market at Mon­tacute where we'll be running the herb stall. They expect a thousand people and, by my back-of-the-envelope calculations, if they spent 40P each we'd be doing just fine. Now, I'm revising my estimate: to make up for the pig loss we'll need to come home with £600. I have absolutely no idea whether this is realistic or a complete pipedream. More importantly, is our eagerness to have a farm, and to watch the pigs and chickens breed and grow, to have the sort of romantic country idyll you see in picture books, actually preventing us from building a sustainable business?

  As we set off to the bird market in Taunton, to see if we can find a female Kagyua duck and a replacement for Mildred, I am fearing just that.

  'I'm out of my depth,' Charlie says, as we drive out of Ilminster and the rain starts pattering down on the windscreen. 'I know what makes a good vegetable, but I don't have a clue about what makes a good pig.'

  The bird auction is being held in the Taunton cattle market. Trucks and trailers containing sheep, lambs, cows, sows and boars are loading and unloading their cargo. The air is thick with the sounds of the animals, the squealing of brakes and the shouts of the buyers and sellers. The rain is falling steadily by now, and the ground is running with the muddy yellow stains of animal muck. The rare-breed birds are being sold in one half of the pig barns: inside it is heaving with farmers, breeders and families with young kids out to buy a couple of fancy chickens to keep in their back gardens. Steam from wet clothes drifts into the air. It is smelly. The auctioneers, two young guys wearing green overalls, keep up a running mumble of inaudible words as they parade along the top of the pig pens, above the crates containing the individual chickens.

  David and Josh are already there. There is no mate for our splendid blue-black Kagyua duck, only another drake, who is being sold as 'great breeding material'. There are no turkeys at all, male or female. Standing squashed up against a cage containing two blue buff Orpingtons, I find myself next to Darren Riggs and his two children. I ask him how much his dead pigs had weighed. He looks pleased. 'Eighty-four and eighty-seven kilos dead weight.' Ours had weighed fifty-six, fifty-eight, sixty and sixty-four. 'It's all been sold to friends in the village and our deep freeze is bulging with the rest of it.'

  'What did you feed them on?'

  'Grass, organic pig nuts and old vegetable scraps from the kitchen.' No substantial difference there, but Darren's fat porkers must have had a lot more of something than ours. I wonder if his were older, but in fact his two had gone to Snells at seven months, slightly younger than our four. There had been a good, inch-thick layer of fat on both his pigs.

  'What sex were they?' I ask.

  'One of each,' he replies, raising his hand to bid for a pair of Brahmas, which a second later go for £5 more than he is willing to pay.

  'Don't boars taste different?'

  'That's just an old-fashioned myth. If you eat them before they're sexually active, there's no difference. I don't know why people still believe that.'

  God, how depressing. How come Darren can rear two good pigs in his small field, and we can't? I am angry that David hasn't seemed very perturbed about the Bonners' verdict on our meat. Charlie is angry that our polytunnels are only now being fully planted. We are both cross that our ignorance has been exposed. It had been humiliating standing in the butcher's shop, with old Mr B whispering so that the other customers wouldn't overhear. We walk back through the rain to where we've parked our car, in one of the car parks of Taunton Cricket Ground, to find the gate is locked and there's no one around. It takes us almost an hour to rescue the car and set off home.

  Later that evening, I discover that we've run out of eggs. The rissoles I am making from a leftover piece of beef will fall to pieces without an egg to bind them, so I set off with the dogs and a torch to collect some from the hen house. The farm gate is closed and padlocked, so I climb over, leaving the dogs whining on the far side. The gate to the chicken run is padlocked also. I stand there cursing as the light dies in the sky, the walls of the garden black above me, the geese standing out in the darkness like large snowballs, their shapes indeterminate in the gloom. All the rescue hens and the rare breeds have gone inside their houses; only the geese and a handful of hens are still outside, displaying a complete disregard for the foxes and perhaps too much reliance on the powers of the electric fence. I can see the dogs silhouetted against the gate, and, as I walk back towards them, two of the new baby saddlebacks venture out of their house to see what is going on. I turn the torchlight on their curious little faces, their wrinkly noses twitching with interest and life. I make a silent vow that when it is their time to go up the hill, they will be as fat as barrels. I wish we'd just killed one pig and then fed the other three till they were fit to burst. Killing them when they weren't as good as they could be makes their death feel wasteful.

  When I get home, I dig out an old copy of Charlotte's Web, the wonderful American children's story that I'd loved reading as a child. The porcine hero, Wilbur, was a ferocious eater, never more so than after he became a star, thanks to the cunning of Charlotte the spider, who saves Wilbur from the knife by writing words in her webs which Wilbur's owners believe have originated from the pig. Wilbur's meals are brought to him in a pail and then poured into his trough. 'The slops ran creamily down around the pig's eyes and ears. Wilbur grunted. He gulped and sucked and gulped, making swishing and swooshing noises, anxious to get everything at once. It was a delicious meal - skim milk, wheat middlings, leftover pancakes, half a doughnut, the rind of a summer squash, two pieces of stale toast, a third of a gingersnap, a fish tail, one orange peel, several noodles from a noodle soup, the scum off a cup of cocoa, an ancient jelly roll, a strip of paper from the lining of the garbage pail and a spoonful of raspberry jello.' I'm cheered, as always, by the story and decide to christen the new saddleback herd the Wilburys.

  Over the weekend David talks to his uncle, who tells him that we need to double the amount the pigs are being fed. Those over three to four months will now be getting four pounds of nuts a day and the smaller ones, two pounds. Each pig will eat about £40 to £45 of pig nuts in its life. Then you need to add the £20 cost of 'going up the hill' and about £10
for straw and worming tablets. So if we rear the pigs ourselves, each one will cost £70 to get to market. We can reduce that cost, and improve the quality of the meat, by feeding them rejected vegetables and leaves, by turning them out to grass and by growing fodder beet for the winter. Fodder beets are out of fashion now: they're too much trouble to grow in bulk, so most pigs are fed on nuts all their lives. At my cousins' farm in Great Tew, I remember how delighted I'd been to carve Halloween lantern faces out of the oddly shaped mangel­wurzels that Giogia and Ben grew to feed their animals. In the days before smooth-skinned pumpkins were easily available, they were all we had.

  Rowley Leigh's pig doesn't reach London till Saturday. It has a complicated journey: Dennis drives the carcass from Snells to Rowley's West Country fish supplier, who commutes up to London daily, delivering fish for the restaurant and the adjoining fish shop. The pig is loaded up with the cod, salmon, tuna, hake, turbot, crabs and prawns and delivered to Kensington. I ring Rowley after we get back from the bird market, worried that he is going to say we have sold him an inedible pig, but all he says is that he's heard that the pig is huge (which, of course, it isn't, at least not in the way that a pig can be huge). But there's still no word on the taste.

  Charlie and I write a list of all the things that we feel aren't going right at the nursery, and just after nine on Monday morning I pull on my wellingtons and head across the field for a meeting with David. It is drizzling steadily and there are muddy patches in the park which suck at my boots. I can see David in the distance, feeding the geese and lonesome George. In the dull wet weather this work is no picnic, and my grumpiness starts to fade. As I go through the gate, I am confronted by the twelve little faces of the Wilburys waiting anxiously for their breakfast. I fetch their nuts and they squeal with hunger and expectation, jumping in and out of the trough, on top of each other, pushing and shoving, until finally they each have a place and there's a neat row of piglets, heads down, tails whirling, lined up along the feed trough. Earl and the Empress come charging out of their caravan: the Empress, looking fat, almost knocking us over in her eagerness to get at her breakfast. Bramble's stomach is heavy and hanging low: clearly a pregnant pig, due to give birth on 5 June. Robinson has been bonking Guinness and Cordelia with gusto: hopefully two more pregnant pigs. We will get it right next time.

  I make coffee and David and I settle down in the office. There are pleasing, discordant sounds: the chirping of the small, newly hatched chickens in the storeroom, Radio 1 in the potting shed, the cackle of the rooks in the rookery up in the trees between the nursery and Dillington House, the soft hum of the incubator standing on a bench beside the desk, full of eggs, all due to hatch in the next few days. Any shreds of remaining grumpiness evaporate.

  We go through the planting schedule for the year. To date we have planted:

  26 kilos of onions which will, by the end of July, have grown to fill fifty bags of 25 kilos each. They'll be stored in the new, long store house by the south wall and sold when needed throughout the winter.

  19 rows of carrots which will be ready to eat by early June, weather permitting. More carrots will be grown every month through to midsummer, resulting in enough to store to supply Dillington through the winter.

  4 long rows of early potatoes which will be ready to eat in June. Chris Wilson, Dillington's estate manager, is uneasy about us growing spuds out in the new field. As we're organic we won't be spraying for blight, and if our potatoes get it his crop will too. So it probably isn't worth our while to grow anything other than an early crop.

  6 rows of parsnips which will be ready to eat and over­winter in the autumn.

  3 rows of Swiss chard in the tunnel which will be ready by the end of April. 4 more rows have been planted outside, to be eaten at the end of May. We'll keep planting new rows every month as Swiss chard is popular with Dilling­ton's chef, Mark.

  4 long rows of broad beans, a total of 2,000 seeds, ready for June/July.

  Courgettes have been planted in the tunnels and will be ready in May. More will be planted outside as the weather improves and we should have courgettes for sale from May till October. Aubergines, broccoli, celery have been planted and are doing well. Indoor climbing beans have been planted in the tunnels, as have tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and chillis. They will all be up by the end of June and should keep producing till the autumn. We'll try some tomatoes outside as I'm keen to see if that changes the flavour.

  We then make a list of what we'll plant in the last week of March and the early days of April: peas, spring onions, Swedes, cannellini beans, runner beans, French beans, more purple sprouting, kale, pumpkins, butternut squash, radishes and turnips. There'll be a huge, one-off planting of leeks out in the new field: Dillington wants between five and ten kilos a week throughout the winter, which means planting up almost an acre. The indoor climbing beans - a cross between a runner and a French bean - that we grew last winter were popular with the kitchen staff. They grow to almost a foot long and, unlike standard runners, don't need their tough outside edges removed. We make a note to grow as many as possible for as long as possible in the year. We're short of rhubarb: the house gets through five kilos a week and we won't manage that this year. Possibly we can take some from our garden: just yesterday Charlie decided to force our new growth and upended a large flowerpot over the pink stems which were pushing through the manure. In a few weeks, we'll have far more than we can eat. Six different types of lettuce and salad leaves are being grown. I don't think there's enough, but David says that we're growing enough for the house and there's no point growing more until we're sure of our outlets.

  I sign cheques for chicken feed, pig nuts, two new tyres for the van, insurance for the Transit which we're going to need to transport the herbs to Montacute on Saturday, wages, a vet's bill and diesel fuel. As I tot up the amount of money that's going out, I wonder just how anxious we ought to be. Clearly, we've built something much bigger than we originally planned. Equally clearly, not everything has gone right. We have a pressing anxiety about herbs. Many of the seeds that we planted in January in the hope that they'd have grown into plants big enough to sell at the farmers' market in Montacute are still too small. Only the chives, parsley, salad burnet, mint and chervil are OK. We have a few rosemary plants which look healthy and even fewer sorrels which we transplanted from plants in our own vegetable garden and potted up. But the sage, basil and oregano are still tiny and we need more rosemary and more sorrel. To supplement our stock, David bought in some plugs from a nursery near Honiton and they're now stacked in rows in the greenhouse, growing bigger by the minute in the warmth, and, we have to admit, looking fantastic. Charlie and I aren't happy about the plugs, even though they haven't been sprayed or treated in any way. We never planned to go into a business whereby we bought up plugs, grew them on and sold them for 'a turn'. But David is gung-ho: the herbs are only costing 20p a plug, which, he says, actually works out cheaper when you take the labour costs into account. Charlie and I can see the sense and agree that it's a good plan to get us through a tight spot. But we are not letting up on our own herb-growing programme.

  The swallows come back in the last week of March, over two weeks earlier than the last date recorded on the old potting shed door: 12 April 1852. They come in on the high south winds, straight from the Sahara to their old nesting grounds in nearby barns. I see them first on the 27th, swooping and dipping across the pond at the village end of the park, their blue feathers reflecting off the slanting evening light, the red patches on their heads appearing and disappearing as they turn and tumble in the air currents. They look effortlessly graceful above the water, diving here and there to catch an insect, soaring back up again to float aloft as if being carried by unseen hands. Suddenly, it seems, it is spring. There is the faintest green flush in the hedgerows above the yellow bursts of primroses; the countryside feels full of magic and life, the chains of winter giving way to the unstoppable miracle of rebirth and new life. The rains have cleared and the wind
s have pushed back the clouds, revealing pale blue skies. The air is soft and warm, full of the sounds of birds through which the swallows' twittering song is clearly audible. Costly it may be, but I don't regret this venture one bit.

  The following day, back in London, I go to see Rowley at Kensington Place. 'It's a bit thin,' he says, as I follow him through the back of the kitchens, across the road leading into the parking lot and into the restaurant's storage department and deep freezes. He hauls the pig out of the fridge and lays it on a shiny metal table, then collects another, larger pig to put beside it. No doubt, ours looks skinny and slightly floppy. 'I'll carve it into a loin, roll up this end, and use the middle for a stew, maybe turn a bit into sausages, they'll be nice and lean.' I breathe a sigh of relief. It isn't a reject. A week later, Rowley tells me that his meat chef, Antonio, reported that the pig was a lot better than anyone had thought. It might have been a bit on the skinny side, but it tasted great and was very tender.

  In the first week of March, Hygrade Meats, the meat-packing company in Chard that David used to work for in his early twenties, suddenly announces that it is closing down with the loss of all 305 jobs. Unemployment in Chard currently stands at just over one hundred, so the prospect of that number quadrupling when the factory doors slam shut for the last time at the end of June throws the town into turmoil. Hygrade's owners, the Tulip Corporation, say the closure is a sign of success: they are relocating to their head office in King's Lynn, where they plan to centralise all their operations to maximise profitability. The redundancy terms offered to the workers are the bare minimum and, the company announces, they'll be on offer only to workers who stay with the company till after 1 June. In a letter to the Chard and Illy in the days immediately after the closure is announced, Hygrade worker Steve Martin writes: 'The future for job opportunities in Chard is looking bleak. I have no means of transport to travel to surrounding towns. Like others, I relied on this job to support my family. After ten years plus, it has put me in a dilemma. Do I leave early and forfeit the redundancy pay I am due for those ten years' hard work, or search for a job afterwards when 300 plus people are also looking for work? We all put in a lot of hard work over Christmas, especially to keep up with Tesco's demand. As other factories weren't coping with the workload, they sent extra work to us. We were praised for our hard work and team effort, but now it feels like our dedication has been to no avail.'