vituperation

Wow, has it been a busy two weekends, all devoted to the two little piggies that we’ll hopefully pick up sometime in the next week or so. Last Saturday, I spent the day setting posts, both fence and shelter. If you’ve never had the joy, it’s backbreaking work. Using the tractor to dig the holes is a lifesaver, but carting 8-foot posts around, followed by an 80 pound bag of concrete for each post, will sap your energy in no time flat.

On the upside, you really sleep well.

Last Sunday it rained hard all morning, which kept the concrete from getting set well, so I worked on other things in the afternoon when the sun was out. On Monday — President’s Day — I went out into the middle of nowhere to a sawmill to pick up a load of rough cut poplar with which to side the pig shelter. I had more than enough wood, and it only cost me $64 to side the entire 10×6 building, an excellent price.

Monday was pretty cold, but I didn’t realize just how cold it was until I got out of the truck at the lumber mill. The wind was blowing at a good clip, and it was maybe a hair under forty degrees. I felt like a moron standing out there in my shorts and t-shirt. Of course, feeling like a moron has become second nature to me, so I was used to it.

“This man’s gonna be a pig farmer, too,” the owner of the saw mill said to one of the men loading the wood into the bed of the truck, and nodded in my direction.

“Pig farmer? Me?” I asked.

“How many you got?” the man loading wood asked.

“We’re just getting two,” I said. “To eat. Not to be a pig farmer.”

“This here’s for their shed,” the owner said, this time nodding at the lumber.

“Where you gettin’ ‘em from?” the man asked, and shoved another plank off the arms of the forklift into the bed of the truck.

“From a man just up the road a piece,” I said. Interestingly, the lumber mill is about five miles from the home of the man with the pigs, way up north in the state, just a mile or two from the state line. “Lemuel Johnson.”

The man’s brow wrinkled.

“Egg Johnson?” I said.

“Oh, ayuh, I know Egg.”

“He’s got a bunch of young ones and I’m getting two of those.”

“I had a sow just drop fifteen this morning. Ain’t never seen so many pigs in all my life.”

“Fifteen? Wow!”

I considered asking the man if I could come over to his house to pet the piglets, then thought better of it.

The whole drive home I fretted over whether or not Jezebel would make it. We’ve never been so far away, she and I, and I worried that she didn’t have it in her. She did, though, and we got home without a hitch.

I spent the rest of the day Monday building the pig palace. First, I hung girts on the posts, to make a simple pole building in the style of a lean-to. Then I started cutting poplar to length for the siding. While I did the cutting and later put the roof on, Robyn sided the entire building herself. If I knew she could be so handy I’d have had her out there helping me on ALL the buildings.

Yesterday I spent the day running field fence around the pig yard, a true nightmare. Field fence is a little different from the welded wire fence that surrounds our back yard and the chicken yard. It’s only 39 inches tall, for one, and the wire spacing is different. The bottom of the fence has openings about 2 inches by 6 inches, and the openings increase as you move vertically up the fence until they’re about 6″x6″ at the top. Field fence is made of a lower gauge wire (ie, thicker) than welded wire fence.

But none of that sounds like a nightmare, does it? What makes it a nightmare is that field fence comes in 330-foot rolls instead of 100-foot like the welded wire, and those rolls weigh 241 pounds. Have you ever tried to wrestle something around a muddy field that weighs more than you do?

I got a little over half of the fence done yesterday, and had to stop around 3:00 to get all gussied up to go to the family visitation for a friend whose father died.

This morning, I hung the 10-foot gate, then made fairly quick work of the rest of the fence. It goes a lot faster when you’ve learned from your mistakes and are working on drier ground. Once I finished the field fence, I — contrary to what I said just last week — ran a single strand of electric fence about six inches off the ground, to keep the pigs from digging under the field fence. This past week, I found out that electric fencing is a LOT easier to run than I thought, and the solar chargers are about $300 less than I thought they were. Everything to do the entire fence (solar charger and all) was less than $200, and I have plenty of wire to do two or three more strands if I ever think I need them. As an added bonus, I won’t need to have the pigs ringed.

Once the wire was run (I still need to connect it to the charger), I used a line tensioner to pull it tight. Then it was time to spread in the shelter the two bales of straw I picked up at the co-op yesterday morning. Those two bales made a layer of straw about a foot deep in the shelter, much more than I expected. I never realized they were so tightly packed.

Comfy, too, as Robyn and I found out later when we laid in it during a rest break from pounding t-posts into the ground. She was mighty helpful then, too, holding each one in place while I drove them almost two feet into the ground with a sledgehammer.

She’s brave, that one. I don’t know if I have the nerve to let someone swing something that deadly so close to my hands and head.

The pig area is pretty much done now, thank God. It was some brutal work, trying to get all that done in two weekends, but it’s done. All I need to do now is rig up a smaller pen right around the entrance to the shelter so the pigs can be closed in for a couple of days. That helps imprint on them where “home” is.

And now, pictures.

Behold the bacon palace, from the south.

What pig wouldn’t love that?

I may actually have to spend the night with the pigs once, just because that straw is
so damn comfortable. Seriously, I about fell asleep laying in it with Robyn this afternoon.

Showing how far it is from the house. Even if it smells out here, I don’t think it’ll reach the house.

The food can, already with 100 pounds of “swine feed” in it.

The gate has a hog panel welded to it. The small spaces at the bottom keep small critters
from getting out. The fence is the same way.

The charger, after a brief rain we had this afternoon.

And the single strand of electric fence, waiting for a charge.

The whole shebang, which is about 90×150. I’d thought it was roughly 80×120, but when I measured it
I discovered I was off. That means each pig gets 6750 square feet of living space.

After much consideration, I’ve decided to do the actual killing and butchering of the pigs myself (with a little help). For some time, I’ve believed that if I’m going to be willing to eat an animal, I should be willing to do what it takes to get that animal ready for eating. Slaughtering the pigs right out back in their home will minimize the stress on them, and it should be pretty peaceful. As peaceful as a death can be, I suppose. It’s got to be better than trying to wrangle them into a trailer and drive them to a strange place to be manhandled by strangers for their last moments.

I have a good friend who grew up raising and killing pigs. One of our two pigs will be his, actually. We’re sharing the costs of the animals and the feed, and then he’s going to show me how to kill and butcher them when the time comes.

Probably you’re feeling the urge to write a bitchy comment right now, about how I’m an idiot for wanting to do this myself, or how we’ll screw it up, or how if I really cared about the pigs’ well-being I wouldn’t be killing them in the first place, or how I won’t be able to kill the pigs when the time comes. Knock yourself out. You know how much I love it when people give me unsolicited advice.

Seriously: If you really think I’m going to go into this half-assed, without having studied the everloving fuck out of it and obsessed over it for months before the actual deed, then you don’t know me at all.

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