Carrot time!

 We have some photos from Piggyfriends#2 or, as Auntie Pat calls it, Piggyfriends West.

They have a lovely vegetable garden and here is a picture of their first carrot crop, all ready for the piggies ( and the human Slaves too.)

Like us, they all love the carrot tops even more than the carrots themselves. Here is new girl, Danu, tucking in.

Mama Rin and her daughter, Maki, are enjoying their carrots.

And here are Zelda and Ripley speeding towards their share. Trinity always snatches her food and takes it into her pigloo so we have no photo of her. She even takes her food bowl into her pigloo. Funny pig.

They are lucky in that they do not have rabbits in their garden stealing their carrots.

Oliver Makes His Debut

Ever since we saw Audrey's message about Rickie's new piggy Oliver on the Guinea Pig Daily Digest, we have been hoping to see some pigtures of the little fellow.  Well, here they are (thanks to Audrey for the story and pigtures)!

Please welcome baby Oliver to his new home!  His momma Rickie missed having a guinea pig to love  so much after the passing of her beloved Ralphy, that she waited for little Oliver to become available and welcomed him into her life.

He has had his wellness check from our wonderful vet, has a great appetite, and is learning how to be a social guinea pig.  He is still a baby and won't eat any veggie that is not green; there are even a few green veggies that he's not sure about yet!

Please welcome Danu. New piggy at Piggyfriends #2.

The Connecticut branch of Piggyfriends, that we call Piggyfriends #2. has a new addition! This little lady was handed in at the animal shelter where our one time Junior Slave works.

 

This is her at the shelter. She was called Penny, which some readers may know is the name of our very own Slave! Having recently lost a much loved piggy, Noodle, it was inevitable that this little girl was destined to go home with Junior Slave to fill an empty space in everyone's hearts.

Here she is at home. She was rather nervous at first but has now blossomed. She needed a new name and, after a lot of consideration, her new owners decided on Danu. This little piggy had, at some time, had a litter, whereabouts unknown, and Danu is the Mother Goddess in Celtic mythology rather like Gaia in other mythologies.

Here she is again. As you can see, she is a very fluffy Abby and will be well loved in her new home with other sows to keep her company and piles of fresh veggies and grass from their garden.

So please welcome Danu. We will be able to watch her and her friends on Skype when we have family get togethers.

Bert and Ernie Help Out

 Hello everyone --- Bert and Ernie here!  We are still the new pigs on the block here at Prairie Pigs, but we are trying hard to become indispensable members of the team by being extra helpful to Slave, especially at cage cleaning time.

Here we are, helping to sweep out our cage.  Well, it's more of a quality control function really --- we are carefully inspecting the hay that Slave has just swept up.  Can you believe it?  In this dust pan alone, we found seven strands of hay that we had not even tasted yet.  What a waste it would have been to throw those into the compost!  We hope this serves to demonstrate the importance of letting your guinea pigs help with cage cleaning decisions.

Well, that's enough work for one day!  Here we are engaging in our favourite activity ---  girl watching! (Since it's still several hours until afternoon grass snack time, which is when Meabh the Brave gets let out for her floor time, there are no actual girls to watch yet.  We are really just sitting on top of our wooden houses and staring intensely at the back door of Meabh's cage, rather than girl watching precisely.  But we are absolutely ready to leap into action at any moment that a girl pig might suddenly come into view!)

We hope that everyone out there is safe, healthy and enjoying the summer, and that piggies everywhere are looking for ways to help out!

Better late than never.

After a really cold Spring, when our hawthorn trees did not blossom, the weather suddenly turned really hot and "hey presto", as if by magic, all the trees turned white with mayflowers.

So, although it is ridiculously late, here is Caoimhe being our May Queen.

Slave went to pick some blossom and asked her son, who was visiting for the holiday weekend, to choose a lady pig who would sit still and he selected Caoimhe.

"What is this stuff," asks Caoimhe. " Is it edible?"

Actually the leaves can be eaten. Slave says that when she was little, the children used to eat the leaves and called it the bread and cheese tree.We are not sure that it would be nice for piggies as we eat neither bread nor cheese and anyway the tree has nasty thorns so we will not recommend it as a food item.

A Piggy A-Z. M is for Maki

Hello readers!

We have been sent a photo of one of the Piggyfriends#2 herd, who live in CT.

The girls all had a spa day, with shampoos, pedicures and haircuts and here is Maki, relaxing in her towels and enjoying a leaf.

A Piggy A-Z. M is for May Day......or maybe not.

 Hello readers. Picchu Piggyfriend here.

We were going to make a May Day post. Our girls were competing for the right to be May Queen and have a crown of mayflowers. We have a hedge of hawthorn ( may ) along the side of our garden.

I think that Bella would have won by virtue of her mere weight although Caoimhe is growing to be a big girl too.

Unfortunately, our spring has been unseasonably cold this year and there was not a single blossom to be picked so the girls will have to wait until next year. We cannot have a May Queen without any May.