New Skills #1 - Pride before a fall!

I was cleaning the chimneys in the 'old house' this afternoon.  The first one, above the ancient, beautiful range was fairly straightforward and I lit a little fire just to make sure it was drawing well - all OK.  The next chimney is actually a flue, a stainless steel liner inside the old stack, and connected to a cast iron woodburning stove.  After a slightly grim start (mummified squirrel found inside long disused stove - completely dessicated - horrid!), it went well when I started joining and pushing the rods up the flue, not much soot.  In my head I had planned a simple, lucrative sideline in chimney-sweeping as one of the income streams necessary to make my family's independence a reality, "This is EASY!" I thought to myself.  Almost precisely at that point, the rod jammed and I couldn't push it up OR pull it back.  I kept my head, tried to twist the rod, tried to jerk the brush, tried to move smoothly, tried to combine all the possible variables to get unjammed.  No luck.  The next approach was the standard 'Brute force & ignorance" (as my Dad used to say) - to madly pull the brush back down with all my might, and when that didn't work, to push it as hard as I could.  Initially no luck, but all of a sudden it freed.  Brilliant!  I then tried to draw the brush back down the flue, but came to a definate and immovable stop!  I then pushed further up in the 'free' direction, and went outside (with my site light as it was dark by this point) to see what was going on.

Something's wrong - more investigation needed!

In the gloom I could see what I thought was the end of the brush drooping over at a crazy angle, like maybe one of the rods had folded.  I decided to push more rods through so I could get a better view.

The horrific truth!

As I probably should have noticed, there was a rain-cap on top of the flue, it was now firmly attached to my brush.  Two options were now available to me:
1. Undo the brush and try to withdraw the rods back down the chimney
2. Pull the brush from outside the house and try to pull all the rods up the flue and out
I decided to go with option 1.  It went well for the first few metres, then jammed again.  I have a set of modern plastic / brass rods (from www.screwfix.com) where the brass connection is more or less flush with the plastic rod, and when I need extra-length I also have a set of ancient bamboo rods.  The brass connections on these, depending on the particular bit of bamboo, can be significantly stepped up from the rod, and I guessed it was one of these which had got stuck on the lip of what was left of the stainless flue.
Option 2 then.  I pushed a few more sections through so I could grab the end from ground-level, and started to pull.  After a few worrying jams I finally managed to pull all (by now 25 metres!) of rods out and breathed a massive sigh of relief!
I lit a little 'test fire' in the woodburner - it drew brilliantly and looks great through the glass panel in the door.  Can't wait to get both fires fully stoked up and the ground floor of the house mistletoe'd, mulled, decorated etc. in time for the Winter Woodland Walk!

Vision # 10
I've got several concerns about keeping gramniverous stock (although I love my chickens and pigs), most importantly:

1.  Feed price fluctuations:  Grains are commodities, traded Worldwwide.  Like every commodity, the only winners in grain are the traders.  Price fluctuations and currency variations combine to make an unhedgeable risk  for a business on our scale.
2. Even if price was OK, the Transport Waste is unacceptable.  I want my animals to be fed from local feed ideally, and certainly not from feed which has been imported from the other side of the world.
3. Even if price was OK, the Overprocessing Waste is unacceptable.  Grain is typically grown in a monocultural system, poor soil kept on life support by chemicals.  Totally unsustainable.

The above combine to make keeping pigs and chickens as I currently keep them unsustainable.

Ideally I'd like to 'grow my own' pig & chicken feed, and have considered several 'free' foods which I can probably gather already from Tymawr-Farm, or establish here over time:

	Protein	Fat	Carbohydrate
Ideal Pig Food	17%	4%	34%
Acorns	7%	25%	42%
Walnuts	15%	65%	14%
Hazelnuts	15%	61%	17%
Apples	0%	0%	14%
Pears	0%	0%	15%
Jerusalem Artichokes	2%	0%	17%
Sweetcorn (on the cob)	4%	2%	22%
Skimmed Milk	3%	0%	5%

The 'Ideal Pig Food' percentages come from very roughly (with my finger!) measuring a chart in the very interesting http://www2.hawaii.edu/~halina/201/pigc.pdf [accessed on 5.12.2012].  All the other data comes from http://skipthepie.org// [accessed on 05.12.2012]. 

The most obvious issue with a home-made pig feed, when compared with a commercial 'concentrated feed' is how to provide the required amount of protein.  However, I guess the thing to remember is that 'normal' pig feeds, as their name suggests, are concentrated.  SO, it may be quite possible to feed twice (or even more) the weight of 'free' food, to give the same nutritional value.  Unfortunately, in these 'free' foods, protein seems to be fairly closely proportional to fat, which in the 'ideal pig food' makeup is fairly low.  It seems that nutritionally the pigs ideal food is something like steak and pasta!  Maybe if we're keeping the pigs outside 'free-range' or inside in relatively spacious pens (depending on the weather conditions), that more fat in the feed is acceptable (i.e. our pigs will burn that fat faster than a 'sedentary' industrially farmed pig!).

Nature walk on Friday to see what free feed I can spot for my next batch of weaners!