Notes From Zone 4

Hermione finally had her piglets yesterday, 119 days after coming home from East Hill Farm. Nominal pig gestation is 115 days: She pushed it as hard as she could and of course had them in a snowstorm. The good news is that all is well, six live piglets that she is feeding and looking after. It’s well below freezing out there, so we’re giving them an extra day before we bust in and check sex and notch ears. I’m not quite sure how we’re going to manage the ear notching. I’m sure that giving her a scratch behind the ears will let us look them over, but notching could be a bit much. There is some hope in that both she and Ginny have figured out that Minnie squealing her head off means only that we’ve picked her up. Whether she’ll be so phlegmatic about her own babies is another question.

By the way, I’ve figured out the simple reason that pigs don’t fly. They do not like to fly. They want all four hooves solidly on the ground at all times, thank you very much. Minnie goes positively ballistic when she’s picked up. (yep, smile.) She is getting out less often, and seems to enjoy hanging out with her mama Ginny these days, but when she is out, she absolutely does NOT want back in. She is getting harder and harder to catch.

The birdies in the basement are all doing fine. The ducks and geese are growing by leaps and bounds. The turkeys are falling behind even though they should end up bigger than the ducks, though smaller than the geese.

There’s 55 gallons of sap on the front porch, but it was only 20°F at noon today, so no boiling until tomorrow, when we should get another 25 gallons or so.

Yesterday’s snow put (Concord) NH into all time second place for snowiest winter. We’re still 7 inches behind 1872-73 and everyone but the WMUR weatherman is content to leave it so. He’s hoping for Tuesday to bring the record in. It’s been cold, but not spectacularly so. It feels cold after the last few mild winters, but I think we’d have called this normal back in the 90s.

Now that the localvore site is up and running, I’m back to trying to get ZenCart working here so we can peddle our wool. It’s not finding the stylesheet, which apparently is a known issue involving the .htaccess file. ZC would prefer I just turn it off, but I’m using mod-rewrite and .htaccess to get friendly (to both search engines and people) URLs. I could certainly give ZenCart its’ own virtual host, and perhaps I should, to facilitate https later, but I had planned to put it in a subdirectory since we’ll be starting with PayPal and Google Checkout and their security is (ought to be) as good or better than anything I can do. However ZenCart is known to not play well with others, and I’m only willing to invest a limited amount of time.