One of my favourite moments each year here on the Home Farm is the moment of exultant liberation when our two little pigs are let out of the pigsty for the first time. 

We rear two pigs in our garden for the table each year.  They arrive here to our one-acre garden in Waterford in March at about eight weeks of age, cute as little puppies, and depart five months later for the local abattoir.  We keep them down the end of the garden in a little plot but when they get here first they are too small to let out, and so we keep them in a walled pigsty until they get used to the place. 

There is something supremely joyous about that moment when they are let out first.  They have never been shown how to root - but within minutes of the gate being opened, following a few inquisitive sniffs in the air (could I, should I, will I?) they are busy rooting to their heart’s content and you can tell they just LOVE it.

The commercial pig industry has more or less ignored the move towards free-range produce.  You can get your hands on free-range chicken, lamb and beef but free range pork or bacon is impossible to source.  More than any other animal, the pig is treated horrifically by the food chain and it is all the crueller given that they are as intelligent as your family dog.  To satisfy our insatiable appetite for pork and bacon, we kill approximately 1.3 million pigs per year in this country with almost 90 per cent of them reared on just 380 pig farms.  These pigs are reared indoors, on concrete floors in cramped sheds, fed high protein feed to get them to killing weight quickly, and so bored that they start to bite each others tails off for something to do.  Given the conditions they are reared in, perhaps their miserably short lives (about sixteen weeks) are not short enough. 

Of course the industry will say that pigs are treated humanely and kept in ultra modern, hygienic facilities.  In my experience pigs are not particularly interested in modern, nor do they put much store in hygiene.  Give them some sun on their backs, a bit of space to root in, scraps from your kitchen and an occasional scratch behind the ears, and they will reward you with gregarious company, the finest manure and the best meat imaginable.  In contrast to the ultra lean/ultra bland pork that your supermarket has on offer, a happy outdoor pig produces a deeply “porky” dark meat lined with a decent layer of fat.  The way pork used to taste. 

The Department of Agriculture reports that one in five of the country’s 2,447 registered pig keepers are “hobbyists”, that is keeping less than three animals for their own consumption.  Thanks to the growing army of back-garden pig-keepers, traditional rare breeds like Gloucester Old Spot and Tamworth are making a comeback, largely because they are better equipped than the commercial hairless breeds to thrive outdoors. 

Are there downsides?  Well, the result of all that rooting is that whatever ground you make available to them will be destroyed and in the rainy season that we euphemistically call summer, things can get pretty mucky.  Ideally then, you will need to allocate three plots to the purpose, each at least 100sq meters and rotate the pigs around to give the ground time to recover.  Pigs are noisy at times particularly if they are hungry, and they pee and pooh a lot - dynamite for the fertility of your land, but the neighbours might not appreciate the pong.  They are also big, strong, determined animals weighing up to 300kg and they treat everything (including your welly) as potential food. 

The biggest downside of all however is that at some point these wonderful animals that you have shared your life and your garden with, have to go to slaughter.  Meat, as it happens, does not grow magically on a plastic tray wrapped in cellophane - the brutal reality is that an animal has to die.  The first year we kept pigs, we called them Charlotte and Wilbur which was a mistake because it is doubly difficult to kill animals that are named after the characters from a children’s novel. 

I have given up struggling against growing fond of them while they are resident in our garden.  We should be fond of them.  We should look after them, feed them, fret about them and fuss over their health.  Afterwards, the project shifts gears from animal husbandry to food production.  We joint and carve and cut.  We make sausages, chorizo, salamis and rashers, we cure bacon and make brawns.  We fill the freezer with almost a year’s worth of food.  And we are thankful for every morsel. 

Nicky Fortune

Nicky Fortune’s son Al with pigs.  Photo credit: Nicky Fortune

Nicky Fortune, who has a one-acre garden in Tullogher, Co Kilkenny, started keeping pigs because of the quality of pork available in supermarkets.  “Every time we ate pork it was giving us cramps so we had just given up eating it.  Four years ago we got two saddlebacks.  We put them in a plot up the back where we were going to grow vegetables, so they worked as rotivators.”

The family’s first pigs were called Parsley and Sprouts.  “We were loading them up in the trailor and I remember my neighbour saying to me, “do you want me take them back out, you look miserable!”.  In the end we held on to Sprouts.  I couldn’t let her go.  Every time we tried to eat pork we would be practically choking on it.” That was then.  His three children have got used to having the pigs around.  “They see the connection between animals and meat now.  Alex, our youngest will probably help me with the butchering this year.”

Though something of an old hand at pig-rearing at this stage, Fortune had a bit of catastrophe on the way to the abattoir last autumn.  “I was going down the main road with the pigs in the trailer and the guy driving behind me flashed and when I stopped he came up and said “you are after losing a pig”.  The pig had climbed out and jumped out on the road.  In the end we found him in someone’s garden eating the flowers.”

Ella McSweeney

Ella with pig in Garden.  Photo credit: Kyera Grant

Keeping pigs in the garden is not necessarily the preserve of country folk.  A couple of minutes walk from Blackrock, Co Dublin, RTE presenter Ella McSweeney is rearing two Gloucester Old Spots in a third of an acre garden.  “When is the last time you saw a pig in a field?,” she replies when I ask her what possessed her.  “In 1840 there were 350,000 pigs in Ireland kept on under an acre.  I was looking at old OS maps of Dublin and kept seeing “piggery” on the map.  There is massive potential to re-introduce pigs to Dublin, particularly in those old council houses that have huge gardens. I wanted to experience meat production and be an honest carnivore.”

Her approach has been to keep things as thrifty as possible.  “I got plans for a simple pig ark and made it for eu100 from sandbags and salvaged wood.  I feed them barley and I go to a local veg shop and fill a bucket with stuff they are throwing out.”

The Department of Agriculture Inspector, she says, thought she was mental.  What do her neighbours think?  “They love them.  Pigs are endlessly entertaining.  I have never had so many friends.  People just come around and want to stare at them, touch them.”

McSweeney’s pigs are being killed soon, and she will do the butchering herself, having done a pig butchery course with Philip Dennhardt at Ballymaloe.  “I will miss them because they are a huge presence but I was very clear from outset that they are not pets.”

5 Traditional Breeds

Saddleback: black pig with a white belt around shoulders
Gloucester Old Spot: hardy white pig with black spots
Tamworth: a hairy, red pig
Berkshire: one of the oldest breeds, black with white legs
Oxford Sandy and Black: excellent temperament and high quality meat

5 Tips

1) Always keep more than one - pigs are incredibly sociable animals and like company.
2) You will need to apply for registration as a pig herd owner under the Department of Agriculture’s National Pig Identification and Tracing System.  You will receive a herd number (and possibly an inspection).  Call 1890 504 604.
3) If you are keeping pigs in an area of your garden and they escape, they will do serious damage to the rest of your garden.  Try a combination of sheep fencing and a battery powered electric fence.
4) Pigs are not fussy about housing but it must be weather proof and sturdy.  A pig ark, outhouse or stable would be ideal. 
5) Typically pigs are fed pig nuts or a mixture of grains including barley.  Keep a pig bucket under your sink and put all leftovers (but absolutely no meat) in it. 

Michael Kelly is author of Tales from the Home Farm and founder of GIY (Grow it Yourself) Ireland. Visit the pig forum at http://www.giyireland.com

We harvested the last of our red cabbage yesterday - four decent heads which have survived the frost and ice. I was looking for something interesting to do with them (apart from coleslaw!) and came across this recipe from Delia Smith that used up all four heads! It’s nice and sweet and goes well with a baked spud or some chops. It freezes and re-heats well which means it’s a good way to “store” them too.

2 lb (1 kg) red cabbage
1 lb (450 g) cooking apples, peeled, cored and chopped small
1 lb (450 g) onions, chopped small
1 clove garlic, chopped very small
1/4 whole nutmeg, freshly grated
1/4 level teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 level teaspoon ground cloves
3 level tablespoons brown sugar
3 tablespoons wine vinegar
1/2 oz (15 g) butter
salt and freshly milled black pepper
Pre-heat the oven

First discard the tough outer leaves of the cabbage, cut it into quarters and remove the hard stalk. Then shred the rest of the cabbage finely, using your sharpest knife (although you can shred it in a food processor, I prefer to do it by hand: it doesn’t come out so uniform).

Next, in a fairly large casserole, arrange a layer of shredded cabbage seasoned with salt and pepper, then a layer of chopped onions and apples with a sprinkling of garlic, spices and sugar.

Continue with these alternate layers until everything is in. Now pour in the wine vinegar, lastly add dots of butter on the top.

Put a tight lid on the casserole and let it cook very slowly in the oven for 2 to 2½ hours, stirring everything around once or twice during the cooking.

Red cabbage, once cooked, will keep warm without coming to any harm, and it will also re-heat very successfully. 

Finally, got a good load of seeds sown today!!  Nothing direct in to the ground yet, but making a start on seeds indoors which will be planted out in the polytunnel when they are seedlings.  Have a garage outside which we converted in to an office a few years back and it has now been annexed as a potting shed!  Have a large bench in there where the spuds are chitting and a heating mat on which we put seedlings.  Everyone has their own methos of seed sowing - here’s mine.  Sieve compost in to trays, water well, then sow the seed and then add more sieved compost.  I then cover with cling film which keeps moisture locked in, but remove this when the seeds germinate.  So for what it’s worth here’s what was sown today:

In seed trays: aubergine (enorma), tom (brandywine, gardener’s delight and moneymaker), chillipepper (early jalepeno)

In a 150-cell plug tray (each row 10 cells):

2 row lettuce webs wonder

1 row red salad

1 row perp spinach

1 row salad stir fry mix

2 or 3 cells chard

2 row beetroot (bolivar)

2 row radish (french breakfast)

1 row spring onions (white lisbon)

1 row rocket

1 row salad leaf (niche mix)

1 row scarlett kale

2 row celeriac (monarch)

The other notable event this weekend is that we got to harvest the first of our purple sprouting broccoli - and very tasty it was too.  Roll on the spring!