Bog Myrtle & Peat

Pork and apple is a famous combination, and as the trees begin to rock for the autumn, fruit falls freely into the grass. It’s easy to buy food in for the pigs, and while processed nuts have certainly become more expensive over the last eighteen months, you just can’t beat the simplicity of a complete nutritional balance in a handy, well-made bag. So all temptation leans towards the obvious option, and the apples are left to moulder where they fall. But by the same logic, if you really wanted pork, you could buy it in the shop without the cost and labour of fattening your own. 

Looking at my life and the endless pull to do more and faster, I realise that I’ve sometimes done seven or eight chores before breakfast time. To achieve this, I’ll have taken every shortcut and efficiency to press the work into the smallest number of minutes – but I know that to follow any one of those tasks to the fullness of its own potential, each one could fill an entire day. 

It’s certainly the case with keeping pigs. Forget everything else that I do with my life; two sows and a few dozen piglets a year is enough to fill my hands completely. It’s daft of me to cram them in alongside so many other activities, so I’m making a renewed attempt to heed them. And with apples falling from trees all around me, it’s time to gather a crop which might otherwise be wasted. This task is baffling, because by any standard of modern economics, the activity doesn’t pay for itself. By the time you’ve been out with sacks and filled them, you might as well have bought bags of complete feed from the supplier – or had them delivered on a lorry. But these are apples; apples, and if they really are worth less than the time it takes to pick them up, I don’t understand the world at all.

So I fill sacks with fruit, and the first to fall have been a sweet and fine-scented variety from a tree in the hedge at the neighbour’s place. Some of these apples have a flush of cherry-bright colour, but mostly they’re a cold, ascetic green like the inside of an oyster’s shell. The best ones dance and climp together when they’re tossed into a crate, but there are hundreds in the grass beneath the brambles which have softened and the mice have had away with the heart of them. They all go in together, and wasps birl around the barrows on the short walk home, snagging themselves on trailing threads of gossamer. Against the rained-out horizon, shoals of busy linnets stand on the dyketops and out in the jointy coral of fattening hawthorn berries.

The pigs could eat apples all day, but the fruit is not a substitute for proper fibre and protein. It’s nothing like a complete diet, but it takes some strain off the commercial food and draws a clearer connection between food and the place where it’s produced. So they crunch into apples, then they waddle indoors to sleep deeply on beds of bracken which I cut and baled for them in July. That was a big job in its own right, but straw is expensive and hard to find in anything less than half-ton blocks. I used to buy it in, but bracken does the same job and all it takes to rescue the fronds from waste is a sharpened hook, a wooden rake and a few hours on a hot day. It’s not a leisure activity, but a kind of work undertaken in a spirit of defiance against passive efficiency. 

There have been times when I have railed against the work and waste of keeping pigs. I complain that it’s a bind and my useful, productive time is being eaten up by countless chores to keep a pointless project on track. If I’ve made it sound like I have mastered a circular sense of spiritual harmony, don’t be fooled. My inner peace is subject to sputtering misfires and I frequently forget myself in a furnace of impatience and rage. But when I am able to turn that fury on its head and look instead to make a virtue of the inconvenience, pigs can really start to pay their way.