New pigs, new rabbits, and yummy chicken!

Life has been all sorts of fun for us here lately! We have been adding lots of new critters to our little mix here. Our "big" addition was our Gloucestershire Old Spots pigs. These have a really great story to go along with them, so I will try your patience and add it here. Hopefully I can make it interesting! A few weeks ago I was browsing other farmer's websites and ran across a picture of the Old Spots pigs, the picture was of a sow with a litter of piglets, and it was love at first sight. They are soooo cute, little "dalmatian" pigs. I decided that I must have some of those pigs. But then reality struck. They are not so easy to find. The closest breeder I could find in my preliminary search was in Kansas, way too expensive to ship from there. So it became a "some-day" dream. Then, a few days later, there was a post to one of the yahoo groups that I have subscribed to:

"Here is a request from the anonymous Zoo - Please reply directly to them if you can help. - Thanks, name removed
I am contacting to see if you might know of anyone currently looking for GOS pigs. We have two females born in April 2005 that we are looking to find a home for, but they cannot go for slaughter. Currently they live in our farmyard at the anonymous Zoo in Southern California and we are looking to downsize our animal collection in the farm. We already have some other pigs and it would be helpful to our budget and staff to find a new home for the GOS pigs. We raised them from piglets and they are pretty docile, we go in with them and such. If you know of anyone for one or both or want to forward my information it is appreciated. They were purchased from Winter Creek Farm in Oregon we can possibly help with transportation."

WOW! I immediately jumped on it. I got in touch with the people in charge and they were almost as excited as I was since we are as close to them as we are. They got everything approved and within 10 days we have two beautiful, old spots pigs. I have just had the warmest, fuzziest feeling possible when I think about how much God loves us that He will answer even our "silly" prayers. And that is how we came to have our Gloucestershire Old Spots pigs, Edith and Marie. We are giving them a few weeks to get used to their new surroundings, feed, keepers, etc. before we introduce them to the other pigs. We are planning to breed them with our Berkshire boar for now. At some point we hope to be able to breed some purebred GOS pigs and help to continue this great heritage breed.

We were also able to get some Silver Fox rabbits! Another great story. We have been hoping to add rabbits to the mix for almost a year now. We have been doing our research, reading up on rabbits, joined the ARBA (American Rabbit Breeders Association), and reading information on yahoo groups (again with the yahoo groups). We had decided that we really liked the Silver Fox rabbits, they are listed as critical on the http://www.albc-usa.org/ website. They are a dual purpose rabbit, excellent for both meat and fur. They are the only rabbit whose fur, when stroked from back to front will stand straight up, until it is stroked in the opposite direction. Again, a great breed, and again, very difficult to find. There is a huge rabbit show in October or November, the ARBA nationals, and we figured that would probably be our best bet. And then, another post to another group:

"I may have to drive to So Cal (Orange County, Anaeheim/Cypress) in the nextweek or two... Family health issues, and should have some Silver Foxavailable and be able to transport.. Please email me if you are interested in either."

Excitement again! I emailed her and, voila, we are the proud owners of a silver fox buck and a bred silver fox doe! We should have babies in about 30 days!

And, finally, we processed our Dark Cornish chickens on February 6th. To say we were amazed with the final results would be an understatement. I am hoping to hear from others who have tried them, but we were so pleased with the way they taste. We have already eaten two of them and they have both been the most delicious chicken we have ever had. Homegrown "frankenchickens" are very tasty, homegrown heritage chickens are even better. We will be getting some "Colored Range Broilers" the first of March. The breeding stock for these birds is from the birds used in the French "Label Rouge" free range program. They are "healthy, with a succulent flavor and texture". We will be keeping some of these along with the Dark Cornish that we kept as the beginning of our own breeding program. We only expect to have 12 chickens available out of this batch, we are planning to process them mid-May. If you would like to get some of these chickens, we would suggest that you reserve early!

Well, that is all of the big news for now! Thanks for reading.