The Beauty and the Rot

In nature often we will see perfect beauty sitting right next to rot. Good sitting hand in hand with Bad. This beautiful little butterfly sitting about with a bunch of flies sucking up sugary watermelon water from a rotton watermelon is an example.  We found this watermelon when picking in that patch – it already had a hole in it.

So what does this teach us. Does everything have to teach us something? 

I think so. If nothing else, I learned that this is a Viceroy butterfly – I have not seen one here before but evidently they like watermelons.  But seeing this perfect butterfly compete with my enemy the fly, for a drink from a rotton watermelon, creates a need in me to untangle this puzzle. A visual metaphor.

The piglets are having a hiccup – we had started to mix in a new bag of feed and almost all of them had runny bottoms by yesterday afternoon. Also we mowed their garden yesterday so they were rooting through freshly mowed greens. Scours in animals terrifies me. They are drinking a lot of electrolyte and I have thrown out all that new feed.  The chickens can have it. It was a special and very expensive piglet mix  designed to get them to eat more but now they will be slowly introduced to the fresh home made pig mix and we will see how that goes. But I don’t want to lock them off their outside toilet when they are this messy. The problem may also have been caused by worming them (you will remember that we have round-worm in this soil).  It is hard to nail down a cause.

But the reaction is extreme. Besides the electrolyte, I gave them yoghurty water often yesterday too and they drank that with gusto. (I am holding the cows milk until they are back in order).  Interestingly the hand-raised piglets are unaffected though all the piglets are still eating and drinking and playing. This shot is from earlier in the day yesterday before anyone showed signs of illness. If a pig is sick I ban the dogs first as they run from pen to pen following us about spreading bacteria with their feet.

That is one of the handraised piglets visiting with Boo. We will see how they all are when the sun comes up.  They were all cuddled up fast asleep in the night – ears up as I watched them, no-one out on their own at that stage.  An animal who is very sick  will isolate herself.  That has not been happening so far which is good.

Aunty Anna (on the left) is in heat and making sure everyone knows it.  On the right is the Hereford steer.  He is a lovely animal.  In two months Aunty Anna will go over to Carlos.

Egoli always sits in the same place every day, twice a day, above the milking room. And when I have finished milking he yawns, stretches and drifts down the wall to have his milk.

Mr Flowers.

The nights are significantly cooler now. I have opened up the interior sleeping quarters for the piglets so they can get right out of the cool air that is drifting down at night. The blankets are coming out of the cupboards and will hang on the line to air today for the humans.

I hope we have a little more summer coming after all this time not being able to get into the garden because of the rain.  But the late winter garden seems stalled.

And I hope you have a lovely day.

Love celi

PLUS: The Pig Rescue T shirt campaign has finished  and you all made 648 dollars towards helping  Lurch the rescue pig get back on his feet. Also many of you donated money through paypal and checks – thank you so very much. I have not been able to thank you all individually for obvious reasons but please know that I am thrilled at your generous response. Some of the funds will go to paying the vet  ($162.00) and then I will be printing a cheque for the pig rescue and Nick and I are hoping to take it down and deliver it by hand later this week. (I have to transfer everything out first and this takes a few days for each step).  So it might be early next week. However we hope to go down and take come photographs for you.  So we can all see how he and Winston are doing.

Thank you again. c