Rebecca Carroll

You can dry farm pumpkins in San Francisco Bay Area - even in hot places like Marin and Sonoma.  have to choose sites carefully - grow better in wet winter zones - and then heavily mulch. Ideally early ripening things do better with dry farming anything and often some water is used in the first period of transplanting, but not always. I just saw a farm that always dry farms squash and we accidentally had a crop last year after feeding them to our pigs the year before. No watering. But they were in the area that is very wet in the winter and only survived where we had hay mulch (our goat shed bedding put along the fence line) on the ground.

I had my first litter last week. I managed to remove piglets at intervals from mom to avoid crushing for 4 days then day 5 during the day I had let them outdoors with her and wasn't paying attention for 15 min and she killed one. You couldn't hear the screaming bc she was completely on top of it.
So I went back to hard-core monitoring and removing of piglets.
That first week they have to eat every hour (sometimes they eat every 20 minutes. So I got up to let them out every hour and 15 through the night and spent long periods of time with them during the day. I found that when my sow is tired after dark she let's them nurse better. So from 7/8pm until 10pm I often stay in the pen with them so they can eat nonstop. We also have a farrowing crate we made with pallets that is extremely important. And a big bin with heat lamps that I can keep them in if I don't want to monitor them in person (or continually on camera).
Granted this is a huge time investment but it is what works for me. Additionally, next time I would choose to breed for summer births bc winter makes the care much harder.