Last year we kind of decided to get some piglets at the last moment. A friend of mine raises them and had asked us earlier in the season if we would be interested in getting some. I told him we would and totally forgot about it. One day in May he called and asked if we were still interested I said yep, when would they be ready? In 2 days. Sweet. So we had to throw together a quick pen for them.
I ran and got some cedar posts from the lumber yard
I decided to stick them in the back field where eventually we will be building a barn. I laid them out on the ground to do a quick mock up of the pen.
We dug a hole for the first post so we could use the rail as a guide for the correct placement of the second post
After we found the proper location we dug our hole
and continued working our way around the perimeter
Since where we were putting the pen was so wet I grabbed some bags of cement to stiffen up the holes
Once we got the bottom rails installed we started dumping in the bags of cement into the holes
since the ground was so wet we didn't even bother mixing it, we just dumped it in dry
and used a breaker bar to compact it in and around the poles
one side all installed
we made quick work of the other 2 sides and put a extra bag in the end pole that would be supporting the gate
we mounted a 4 foot gate and set the last pole that we would use to latch it with
we then took some 4x2 welded wire and ran it all along the inside of the fencing, that way if the pigs pushed against it it wouldn't come off
I had some 2x12 boxes left over from when I had expanded my raised beds, so I decided to use them to throw together a shelter for the piglets. Since we were only keeping them till October, I wasn't to concerned about the cold
we cut a opening for the shelter
and just stacked the wooden boxes on top of one another. We screwed them together and kept cutting out for the opening
we only went 4 courses high and I didn't cut the last one for stability
almost done
it was starting to get dark so we called it a night
the next morning I woke up and grabbed some scrap 2x6's we had and nailed them along the bottom of the posts, that way to keep the pigs from rutting under and lifting the gate
and I continued around the perimeter
I buried a extra 2 posts for the pigs to rub up against and to stabilize the boards in case they leaned up against them
that afternoon we went and picked up our new animals
the pug wasn't quite sure about them
he wouldn't be bigger than them for very long
I threw a tarp across the top to temporarily keep the rain out and laid down a bed of straw, they seemed to like it
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