A Pig in my Garden

I sometimes worry about the image that I portray about New Zealand; it must seem at times as the most unsophisticated place on earth. In reality this is not so, it's just the madness of my tiny little slice of New Zealand and the latest is a pig in my garden.

Now even for me this it getting to the limit and I have to admit the kids were NOT impressed. Via a friend of a friend, a friend of mine was offered a pig. What was expected was something already butchered and quartered, what arrived was still moving, actually, it was still doing everything. What arrived was an adult, Kune Kune which is classed as a semi native pig.

Now my experience of pigs is when I had the farmlet, The Farmlet, NZ Style and they were a hybrid breed, not known for their lovely temperament. I remember having to hurriedly sit on top of my car roof one day when we were helping a friend separate a sow from her piglets. Luckily Kune Kune's have a lovely disposition.

Now what was I going to do with this pig? In my madness, I offered my backyard as a holding pen. I figured that if I moved the hens into the vacant Avery, then the pig could stay in the glasshouse come henhouse, and its run. The thought did briefly cross my mind of a bull in a china shop, was there a saying for a pig in a glasshouse, I wonder?

After a day of rummaging in this area, I got my son and his friend to use the old roofing iron, hidden behind the garage to build a temporary fence across the back quarter of my property. This area has always been rough, and after the years of my son using this area to build, dig etc, plus it incorporated my spent veggie garden for the season, it wasn't exactly prime, mowed lawn. So now, I went from a pig in my glasshouse, to a pig in my garden.

The rest of my menagerie was as unimpressed as my kids. The hens just couldn't figure out their change in housing, it was always a fight each night for the glasshouse, and they punished me by stop lay-ing. The dog was the shock. Zeb is normally this placid, sleep by the fire, type animal. Instead, he obversely has a repressed dream of being a pig dog. Lucky for him the pig was so placid and slow that my dog didn't get hurt and pig was lucky for Zeb was all noise, not much action and I didn't let him out in the back yard on his own.

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