Wasn't it lovely weather this weekend? So different from how Bank Holidays normally turn out ;)
We'd put aside the weekend to address some outstanding piggy-related matters, namely a pen change round and sorting their trailer out. I also held out some hope that I could get some serious studying done.
Unfortunately, last week we realised that at 10ft by 6ft the trailer we bought is too large for the number of animals we want to keep, and ran the very real risk of injuring the one or two animals that would be transported in there. Ideally, the interior of a trailer should be only just larger than the number of animals that you are going to transport, as they can fall over and break their legs during transport. They need to be packed in on straw snugly so they can't move around too much. Our trailer had no facility for reducing its internal size, no gates or pens, and no fixtures to attach anything to.
So, last Thursday we reluctantly decided to find another, smaller trailer and sell the larger one. We found a nice small secondhand one in Sheffield, went to have a look and bought it on the spot. This is an Ifor Williams P8, so will take about 6-8 ewes or 4 piggies and has internal gates that can reduce the size by around half using a wooden gate so the animals don't roll around. It is also much easier to tow, we can see around it in our rear view mirrors, and needs no work doing to it. It's ready to go. We'll finish the restoration of the other one and put that back on ebay sometime in the autumn.
So, we have the trailer - we now need to introduce it to the pigs. To reduce stress, we intend to leave the trailer in the pig pen so they can explore it for a few days before one of them goes to the abattoir, however, that necessitated some alterations to the pig pen to make a 'gate' we could open and put it in. Then we decided to rearrange most of the hurdles in the pen and give them a fresh area to explore.
The pen re-arrange in May
The pigs love fresh grass, so normally we mow the various grass areas we have in rotation every few days so we have some fresh greenery to give them, which they scoff enthusiastically. However, the area around their water had become a total quagmire since the last pen rearrangement at the beginning of May (picture above), mainly because pigs drink and wee at the same time, and despite throwing bales of straw down frequently it simply wasn't absorbing any more fluid and was a foot deep. We needed to move the hurdles onto fresh ground and exclude as much of the quagmire as possible.
A small area of foot deep mud
We've effectively made two pens from the hurdles and have fashioned a gate out of them using a spare hurdle. We've also arranged one of the hurdles of the new extended smaller pen so it can be easily turned into a gate so we can back the trailer through.
The new clean pen area attached to the old pen
The old pen area, reduced by half with new extension (out of shot)
The join between the two pens with the 'gate'
The new pen is underneath as apple tree, so you can imagine their delight in finding windfall apples along with the grass. They've been having a whale of a time out there, rubbing themselves over the ground and burrowing in the straw we put down. Hopefully, the quagmire will recover and then I'll rake the ground out level and reseed it ready for sheep in the autumn.
It didn't take very long to do and left me with plenty of time to study, almost an entire day in fact. After some very helpful comments from readers, I've now decided to spread my A'Levels out across the full two years. I realised that it would be too complicated to work out a staggered approach and require a bit of chopping and changing of syllabuses. The simplest way of doing it is to do the A'Levels as linear and take the exams in May 2019.
I have my study timetable sorted out, and for the most part I keep up with that on a daily basis, often studying first thing in the morning before work when I am fresh and an hour or two at the end of the day when I seem to get a second wind up to about 10:30pm.
I have found www.thestudentroom.co.uk extremely helpful when it comes to study techniques and advice on how to achieve A* grades. Most of my assumptions and negative feelings about Maths have been due to the way I was taught and things I heard from other people, so I have been addressing those. These have been acting as a 'brake' on my progress until I examined why I felt the way I did. I came across a great article here that discusses why so many people in the UK think they are 'no good' at maths.
Eye opening, especially the misconceptions about speed and accuracy.
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