Pending Bacon

When I ran into David the other day, our second topic of conversation was the pigs.  Mary and I are sponsoring one of these guys, and David said I really needed to get over there and check on how they were doing.  "They've really grown!" he said.

So while I was tooling around checking out the last pickings for the final famers market, I also strolled over for a look at the pigs.

They have grown.  They are easily twice the size they were back in August (check out the new "Pigs" label below, that will be how I tag the past and future posts on them).

Now, there are three little anecdotes I need to share to completely catch my readers up on the status of the pigs. 

First, the title of this post, "Pending Bacon," is one I would like to ascribe to Michael Perry, author of Coop - there's an Amazon link to the right.  In the book he describes raising some pigs, and on his blog he tagged an entry with the trending topic "#pendingbacon" once - so I've adopted that as a way to refer to the pigs, too.

Next, I want to write about the pigs first few days on the farm.  They were quite small then, actually about 50 pounds each (on their way to 300 or more by February).  They spent the first night in the accessible goat pen.  The pigs were comfortable, but the goats didn't much care for the arrangement.

I have a video of the pigs emerging from the goat pen the next morning in a previous "Pigs" post.  During those adventures, they figured out they could get into the brooding house if the little door was open..  They were small pigs after all, and they didn't know they'd outgrow that space in short order.  Eventually they took to sleeping on the floor of the brooding house, all in a comfy porcine cluster below the roosting hens. 

The pigs liked it, the hens didn't mind, and most of all, the goats were happy and all the barnyard conflicts were smoothed over.  Of course, now that they are too big to get into the brooding house, they're sleeping with the goats again.  The goats are over the inconvenience of all of this, however.

Finally, the naming of the pigs.  These guys had a fluid identity going on for the first couple of weeks.  Readers may recall that I wanted to name the one (whichever it is, or ends up being) that we have adopted "Pork Chop," which should be pronounced "Poke Chop."  However, I was informed by an authority at the farm that names like that are not appropriate at this stage of the game.

In fact, this authority, David and Heather's daughter, told me about how carefully the names were to be decided, and that she was working on it.  Candidate names included:

• Pinky
• Frankie
• Seven (for the unique shape that one of the tails maintained)
• Stevie

These are all good names.  But things weren't quite settled yet - I think there is a zen element to the process, but I haven't confirmed that.

The next week when I stopped by, there was progress to report.  The name "Stevie" had been selected.

"Which one is Stevie, then?" I asked.
"All of them are named Stevie," she said.  "And the last name is 'Yum-yum.'"

So there you have it.  Four little Stevie Yum-yum's in a pen.

February's comin' though.