Our six pastured pigs are getting awfully big, and they have minds of their own. Every few days, Karen has to move their electric fence to give them access to a new swath of pasture, since grass-fed pork is the name of the game here. Once the fence is off, they can escape if they want to. They've done it before. How can you deal with this problem?

I was out mowing and I watched Karen work her magic. She had a trick all worked out: the pigs were hungry. They look to her for food. So their first impulse is to follow her around, not to leave and go foraging on their own. As she worked, she'd pause once in a while to fetch a few hard-boiled eggs from the pickup, and give these to the pigs. This kept them close at hand and totally under her control until she was done. Then she gave them the last of the eggs, stepped over the fence, turned on the juice, and was gone. A job well done!

A feed bucket can do more than any amount of yelling or pleading.

By the way, we take all our cracked or otherwise unsalable eggs and hard-boil them for the pigs. During the off-season, when we have no pigs, we fill up a chest freezer with hard-boiled eggs. Pigs will gladly eat frozen eggs, shell and all. If the eggs are stuck to the carton, which they usually are after having been frozen, we feed them carton and all. The pigs have nothing but time, and will happily separate the eggs from the carton on their own.

Grass-fed, egg-fed, pastured pork is like nothing you can find in the store. Feel free to envy us.

It's tempting to fill your day with farm chores, but the fact is that farming (and rural living in general) is filled with projects that have to get done, projects that happen once in a while but not every day. If you fill up your time with daily chores, you won't be able to get anything done!

This is doubly true if you have a day job, as I do (in the WAN acceleration group at Citrix Systems). There's been a big deadline crunch that's kept me from getting my newsletter out on time or even respond to email properly. But I get my daily chores done because (a) I've purposely kept a lid on how many I accept, and (b) There are limits to how much I'm willing to let things slide in a crisis.

I figure that 2-3 hours of daily chores are about all a full-time farmer can afford. For a part-time farmer, it's much less. Too many things come up that require large blocks of time -- some planned, some not. The chicken houses have to get built, escaped livestock have to be coralled, failed machinery has to be repaired -- it all takes time, and lots of it.

So keep that chore load low!

Memorial Day weekend is the traditional opener for farmers' markets. Here in the Corvallis area, we open about six weeks earlier than that, but still, there's a big upsurge in both customers and vendors over Memorial Day.

Saturday's market was a tremendous success, with swarms of people taking a relaxed amble through the market on a beautiful spring morning. The Corvallis Saturday Farmer's Market is set in Corvallis' Riverfront Park, which is a wonderful setting, at the edge of Corvallis' old-fashioned downtown.

The market gets better every year. Anchored by a few organic farmers who have been perfecting their craft over the past thirty years, and filled in with almost every kind of home-grown product imaginable, quality is always king. And while people in Oregon are almost ridiculously nice in general, at the market these things are raised to a new level in both customers and vendors. It's what Saturday mornings in small-town America are supposed to be.

Some farmers' markets are little more than craft shows in disguise, or feature supermarket-style product in a different venue, but this is the real deal. All the goods have to be things that were raised on your own farm. They don't all have to be edible or anything -- beeswax candles where the wax came from your own hives is perfectly okay -- but it has to be local.

Interestingly, organic certification is losing its punch. There's too much low-quality organic stuff out there these days, and every new purveyor of low-quality wares, lowers the value of the label for everyone.

(Not that I've ever been organically certified. One of my rules is, "I won't join any organization that wants me to fill out more than two sheets of paper per lifetime.")

If you haven't been to a farmers' market lately, give it a whirl. Try all the ones within range, because they very widely. It's especially good if you attend in a lazy, "It's Saturday and I've got all day" frame of mind. Throw a cooler into the back of the car so you can have lunch instead of rushing home with your purchases. Do a couple of liesurely, unnecessary things before you go. You'll live longer.