Property is a piggy paradise
Ross Nolly’s kunekunes eat better than many people and most other pigs.
Between them, Willow and Bella, with some help from a collection of rare-breed chickens, hoovered up 250 kilograms of apples and 50kg of zucchinis last autumn, most of them grown in a food forest just metres away from their pens.
Nolly also prepares a fermented grain mix for them and pampers the pigs with milk, eggs and homegrown greens as well as grass.
He was thinking about getting a dog before the pair arrived as tiny piglets, but the now rotund Miss Piggys are just as good company.
They come at a brisk waddle when he calls and flop down to have their ample bellies rubbed.
‘‘They did the perfect tag team one morning when I came out with the milk, one in front, one behind,’’ he says.
‘‘I did this beautiful pirouette – I could have got a call up for the Bolshoi ballet – and ended up on my arse, but I didn’t spill the milk so I didn’t cry,’’ he laughs.
The chickens and ducks also get fed worms from piles of composting manure in old tractor tyres and sometimes maggots collected by suspending roadkill in a basket over a rubbish bin.
The bins, placed well away from the house, are less smelly than you’d expect and the maggots very high in protein for the chickens.
‘‘They’re like crack cocaine to the chooks and they keep the fly numbers down because you’re killing off the larvae,’’ he says.
The homemade diet keeps the animals in better health than the commercial options and is more sustainable, plus Nolly enjoys doing it, he says.
He’s been a hunter all his life and got serious about selfsufficiency for himself and his animals a few years ago.
Nolly grew up on the family farm near Stratford and trained as a butcher after leaving school, spent time working overseas and later ran a supermarket butchery in Ha¯ wera.
Eleven years ago he gave away the butchery job to become a freelance photographer and writer, and has regular assignments for a variety of magazines.
He’s always been interested in gardening and began planting the trees that shelter his horticultural haven several decades ago, after buying three acres of bare paddock.
The property has slowly developed as time and other commitments allow.
There is a large ornamental garden around his cottage and a permaculture area incorporating the pigs, chickens, a flock of buff orpington ducks, food forest and vegetable beds, is down the back.
‘‘One garden is food for the soul, the other is food for the belly,’’ he says.
On nice days he writes at a table in the garden under a large magnolia with a soundtrack of tui calls and kereru¯ winging past, and cats Bob and Poppy for company.
When no deadlines loom, he’s at work planting, digging post holes and building fences, as his plan for the property comes together, post by post.
Nolly generally wears shorts and jandals all year round, and said it frightens the chooks if they see him in more formal garb.
‘‘If I’m going to do an interview and come out in tidy clothes, they just bail, they don’t recognise me.’’
The garden contains about 140 fruit trees and a collection of weird and unusual plants, including Dead Man’s Fingers (Decaisnea fargesii), which has purple finger-like seedpods, Chinese raisin tree (Hovenia dulcis), mulberries, hawthorns, galangal, myoga ginger, Abyssinian bananas, Japanese taro, Ya pears and a medlar, which has unusually shaped fruit.
‘‘The French call it a dog arse tree and anything with a name like that I had to have,’’ he says.
There are numerous herbs and other plants, many with healing or anthelmintic properties, planted around the trees.
Most are edible or useful in some way.
His collection of chickens – bantams, dorkings and orpingtons – provide eggs and gardening services and surplus roosters become roasts.
The property rings with enthusiastic cock-a-doodledooing.
‘‘They’re like a boy band – the bantam is the soprano, the dorking is the tenor and the orpington comes in at the bass,’’ he said.
Nolly reckons he’s getting close to the work-life balance he wants, despite the still lengthy list of projects he carries in his head.
‘‘The goal is just to have the animals around, grow your food, and just enjoy the things around you,’’ he says.
‘‘I can go out and give the pigs a scratch any time, see the chickens I’ve raised looking really nice, then Willow the silly pig runs out to greet you, trips over her front legs and noseplants into the mud... I know I shouldn’t laugh but I do.
‘‘How do you put a dollar value on those things?
‘‘I hate using the word mindfulness because it gets used over and over again but in some ways it’s a bit like that, just appreciating what you’ve got around you.’’