Way-aye, Roscoe here.

I thought I’d tell you about our grass today. We have several types, but mostly you can divide it into that which Mam picks (or cuts) and brings into us, and that we graze on when we’re out in our run.

We’ve been going out in our run a lot, and it’s been quite hot in the last week or so.

Of course, Mam has been watering the grass with a little pointy spray thing ever since she realised her new grass needed it, back at the end of March. The trouble is, this spray doesn’t reach everywhere, and some of the grass, including the bit where the first veggie patch is going, has sort of lines between it.

Mam said to me it was where the bits that had been laid edge to edge shrank, so now there’s a gap between the edges. I don’t see it myself, but I’m sure she’s right. She has got a plan for it – she will spread soil with grass seed in it where it needs the lines filled in when autumn comes. But that’s a long way away. Mam has plans for everything, as you’ve probably noticed.

Then she got a new water spray thing which she tried out on Friday. It waters everywhere at once, forwards and back again. And the shed roof and the neighbour’s wall… But it works for the whole of our grass and the top of the flowers beyond, which is good.

Saturday it rained nearly all day. Well, showers. Heavy ones.

Anyway, the grass. We eat the new grass. and it’s very nice. That’s ‘very nice’ because it’s not good to seem ungrateful… The bits she cuts for us with her scissors, or just picks and brings in, are much better. They are richer and lusher (and longer). They have flowers on them, the proper grass flowers, still in their long sheath, and those are really yummy.

That grass grows down in the older part of the garden, where it’s damper and shadier. She hoped we’d be able to go and eat it ourselves occasionally, but there are lots of buttercups and daisies as well. I wouldn’t eat those, Mam. I’m not silly. Okay, you can’t guarantee that the others wouldn’t.

But we only get that when we don’t go out. It’s a sort of conundrum. Go out and have quite yummy grass, or stay in and have extra-yummy grass.

Mam’s been reading up on poisonous plants because she was worried Bertie ate horsetail and it poisoned him. There’s lots of horsetail at the bottom of the garden and it turns up pretty well everywhere else, which she pulls out. But she found some growing in one of the places we’d been grazing, so she wondered whether that was why Bertie died. Then she discovered that he would have to have eaten it for several days for it to have started to have an effect. So that can’t have been it.

You know, that’s one of the reasons our Mam is the greatest. She really really tries to do the very best for us, or at least the best she can in the circumstances. When we get out of lockdown, Mam’s hoping to get some other pigs who need a home. I reckon they’ll be very very lucky pigs to join us here.

See you next week, when it’ll be June!

Roscoe xxxx