John Hudson heads to Dorset, where once-common land-management tricks are being used to return a National Trust kitchen garden to its former glory

T wo squads of pigs with very clean habits and not a trace of Mexican antecedents are currently making light work of gardening duties at one of the West's best-known stately homes.

One herd – the boys – is helping to restore the National Trust's Kingston Lacy kitchen garden, in Dorset, while the girls are turning their snouts to a wooded area that will become part of a developing Japanese garden.

In one way it's a case of winding back the clock, since the idea of turning pigs out on to ground that today might be a job for the rotavator, goes back to Victorian times.

This way, the job is done without noisy and polluting machines or chemicals – and the estate's garden and countryside manager Nigel Chalk is full of enthusiasm for his unlikely new team members.

"They're rooting out every last bit of vegetation, clearing grubs and in the process, aerating and breaking up the soil with their snouts," he says. "They're also adding fresh, nutritious fertiliser as they go..."

The piggy workforce totals 11 half-grown Saddlebacks – seven males in the seven-plus acres of kitchen garden and four sows in the smaller Japanese garden.

Stockman Peter Cox, who looks after 127 North Devon cattle on the estate's 250 acres of parkland, is not fazed by adding a few more hungry mouths to his guest list.

"We first planned to sell the pigs on into the meat chain in November, but they're doing such a good job that they've made us see the benefits of keeping a few of them on," says Nigel.

"They're still only youngsters, but they start breeding at about a year old, and that's certainly something else we'll be looking at."

Some people never get beyond the "filthy pig", "that man's an absolute swine" image. On the other hand, Winston Churchill, who kept the beasts, admired them greatly. Dogs look up to you, he argued, cats look down on you, but only a pig will look you straight in the eye as an equal.

Nigel Chalk rather subscribes to this point of view. "They're brilliant characters," he says. "They'll keep their bedding completely clean and they're very intelligent; they know exactly who's coming in to feed them."

They certainly have a task on their hands. The 7.5 acres of kitchen garden were leased to a bonsai tree business until a couple of years ago, but they are now back in National Trust management and in desperate need of reclamation.

"We are breaking this quite big area up into three sections," says Nigel. "There will be our own kitchen garden, to grow fruit and vegetables for our restaurant.

"There is an area around the glasshouses that was planted quite formally back in the garden's heyday in the Fifties, and we plan to do the same, with flowering plants, some fruit and decorative vegetables.

"But a very important part of the project, covering roughly half the site, is the provision of 30 or 40 communal allotments.

"The National Trust recently pledged to create 1,000 allotments nationwide, and this is our contribution to that.

"Local gardeners will be invited to apply to rent them through the Landshare website set up by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. It's an online 'match-making' database of keen growers and people who have land available.

"We all know allotments are in great demand; there are up to 70 families on the waiting lists for them in Wimborne and Poole alone."

The Japanese garden is still being developed, with a great deal of work having been done there over the past four years.

The four Saddleback sows are on an area on the edge of the acer glade, where there are plans to plant more than 100 bamboos to be shaped into a maze for children.

"Keeping the pigs confined is no problem," says Nigel. "They soon get used to working within the confines of an electric fence. The kitchen garden is not yet open to the public, but visitors are able to see the sows at work in the Japanese garden, and they are already becoming an attraction."

He is confident that the work that needs to be done in various woodland areas of the estate can keep a herd well occupied for years to come. The National Trust has made a good choice in the Saddleback, which has its roots in the Wessex and Essex strains of the breed from the 19th century. It looks good – which was obviously an important factor. But above that it is very hardy, has secured a niche in outdoor and organic production and is admired for its grazing prowess.

In recent times, many Saddlebacks have been exported to Nigeria and the Seychelles, where they have been put to coarse grazing in the most hot and hostile conditions. Compared with that, Kingston Lacy looks like a holiday camp.

And so it will remain, at least for the lucky ones that escape the butcher's axe in November – a time that is shaping up to be just as traumatic for the garden staff as it will be for their four-legged friends.

But they've surely not given them names, have they?

"Well, there's one," Nigel replies, a bit shamefacedly. "Sarah Giles, our trainee gardener on the National Trust's careership scheme, she's given one of the sows a name."

And that name is?

"Er, Matilda."

We make it easy for him, and don't laugh. But when there are a dozen beautiful little piglets squealing around the green pastures of Kingston Lacy next summer, what are the chances that their mum will answer to the name of Matilda?

Kingston Lacy, Wimborne Minster, Dorset BH21 4EA. Telephone 01202 883402 or email kingstonlacy@nationaltrust.org.uk