You, too, can have mouth-watering pastured pork if you get your order in by August 14.

Our six little piggies have become six big piggies and they're going to make the big transition from "pigs" to "pork" next week. I don't know if you've ever had pastured pork or not. It's wonderful -- our favorite meat. Lean bacon, mouth-watering pork chops ... I'm not kidding, it's impossible to overstate the quality of range-reared pork.

Our pigs are fed high-grade feed as well as pasture, featuring a daily feeding of cracked or otherwise unsaleable free-range eggs. They are happy outdoor pigs -- a little too happy, since they keep escaping and making cheerful ambles around the neighborhood. They're at the right weight now and have been in sparkling good health since day one.

Our pigs are slaughtered on the pasture by the area's best butcher, "The Farmer's Helper" of Harrisburg, Oregon. They never know what hits them: one moment they're here, the next, they're gone. On-field butchering means that they aren't distressed by a truck ride before slaughter.

We sell pork by the half-pig, cut and cured to your specifications by The Farmer's Helper. If you aren't certain about that step, don't worry -- they'll walk you through it.

But you have to place your order with us by August 14.

For more information, contact Karen at karen@plamondon.com or call her at 541-740-0612.

I've been shamefully neglecting my Norton Creek Farm Web page. This is the Web page aimed at folks who are interested in buying our farm products, as opposed to raising their own.

So it's actually up to date for once, and has some good info on it, including where to buy our free-range eggs and pastured broilers. (Hint: The Corvallis Wednesday Farmers' Market has moved.)

And the page doubles as a dollar-off coupon if you print it out and bring it to the Farmers' Market.

In other news, Corvallis has rung down the curtain on its free downtown Wi-Fi network, much to my disgust. How am I supposed to keep the kids from each other's throats without Wi-Fi? I bought all those laptops for a reason! I am looking into alternatives...

Signs of the season: I've seen the first Christmas tree truck of winter, taking a load of freshly cut trees to be sent on their way. A lot of Christmas trees are grown in my area. Cutting starts about now and usually ends the day before Thanksgiving, though last year there was some activity into early December.

The local Christmas tree industry was developed by a neighbor of mine, Hal Schudel, who developed sustainable, low-impact Christmas tree farming long before these buzzwords were popular. He introduced helicopter logging in 1955, so that Christmas trees grown on steep hillsides could be cut by hand and hoisted out by air, with no need for roads or heavy machinery -- and hence no erosion. He also knew a superior tree when he saw one, introducing the Noble Fir (which makes a much better Christmas tree than the local Douglas Fir). Hal's company, Holiday Tree Farm, has an interesting Web page.

I like having a self-made millionaire as a neighbor and role model.

Not that Hal's the only one. My property borders on Starker Forests on two sides. As with Hal Schudel, T. J. Starker was into reforestation and sustainable yield long before these concepts caught the public eye. Both men were professors at OSU, too.

Starker has a good-neighbor policy which must be experienced to be believed. It's not just a matter of, "Sure, take some of the downed wood for firewood, what the heck." It's more like, "We'll unlock the gate for you and show you where the good stuff is. When's a good time?"

One of the things I like about living here is the quality of our neighbors. They couldn't be better. The only thing I would change is that the Christmas tree truck drivers could slow down a little. 40 MPH is pretty fast for a wet and twisty gravel road.

Recently, some teenagers in my area were camping out and decided to kill and eat a duck for their supper. Bad idea. They were caught.

Now, in the real world, this would have been treated like the imbecile case of poaching that it is, but Benton County is run by city people, who are crazy. There was a hue and cry for a charge of felony animal abuse. Lots of people were itching to get those kids under psychiatric treatment. What could be a stronger sign of mental illness than hunting out of season?

You can see the article here.

This is not an isolated case. A guy in Albany was cited because he had an old, skinny horse, whose skinniness and age were taken as signs of neglect, even though there was a younger, well-fleshed horse on the same pasture (how can you starve one horse and not the other when they're running around together all the time?). If you're not in a rural county, it's important to slaughter your animals before they become old, skinny, or lame, or you'll be arrested. Even if they can be cured, a convalescence within sight of a cell-phone Samaritan may land you in jail. Don't risk it.

If you're planning to move back to the land, don't make the mistake I did by moving to a county dominated by city people. They'll sic the law on you. Find a rural country, preferably one dominated by farmers. You're trying to get away from urban attitudes as well as urban architecture, and this requires that you have at least a county line between yourself and the nearest urban population.

Farmers on the edge of town have always been slapped with nuisance lawsuits for being farmers (the sound of roosters crowing or tractors running, dust from plowing, flies, etc.). This is one reason why such farmers are eager to sell out to developers: city people won't let them farm. But now we're being threatened with jail or mental institutions.

I grew up in Del Norte County in California, which is an impoverished county in the redwoods. The largest segment of the economy was unemployed loggers, and poaching was universal. The game wardens looked the other way if you weren't selling venison in the street, because it helped people feed their families. But by the standards of law enforcement here in Benton County, everyone I grew up with belonged in the loony bin. Go figure.