Pig pen

Looking south.

Come spring, we hope to get several piglets to live on our farm. Pigs do amazing work at digging through and fertilizing the earth, perfect precursors to a field that a farmer hopes to eventually turn into cultivated land. And so, we will release our piglets into their mobile pig pen, protected with solar-powered electric fencing -- our future fruit orchard site -- to do their work.

Looking north.

As a result of five days of good, hard work in the final days of autumn, we cleared another field for livestock... removed dead and fallen branches, cut down diseased trees, clipped brambles and pricker bushes, piled the brush and ex-marked (i.e., lawn-mowed over) anything that remained. What once seemed like a daunting task, and a field that could never possibly be put to use, has been transformed into a beautiful, neat space, where piglets will be happy to root around and blueberry bushes and fruit trees will be happy to grow. 
[Sorry, I don't have a good "before" picture, but the "after" photos here reveal open space... imagine brambles, brush, fallen trees, broken branches EVERYwhere before Nick went up there to do the clearing.]