Those Dern Pigs Have Gone and Done It Now!

Good morning, and welcome back to Ridin Out the Recession. We hope you all are doing well, and thanks for stopping back in to visit with us today.

I’ve shown video’s before of pigs out here on the place. These pigs are the piney wood rooters, and are native to Florida and many other states.

I haven’t seen the first spotted, or part domesticated hog out here yet, they’re all the ole black wild hogs. Here in Central Florida where we’re at, the dern things are heavily populated, and getting worse.
I stated in a prior video that we’d had some coming up in the evenings and were eating what the turkeys weren’t cleaning up during the day. Most times they’ll clean it up pretty good, but every so often they don’t get it all.

What they don’t get the doves, or other birds will get. There’s a pair of sand hill cranes that have figured out the oak under which we feed the turkeys is a feed station, so now they too visit with us daily. It’s funny from time to time to watch them and the turkeys counteract. Sometimes the cranes run the turkeys off, and other times the turkeys will put the cranes in high gear.

Another quick story on these cranes. When we first built out here Cheyenne was just a little thing. Anyway, those cranes would come up in the yard and aggravate her. They’d run up to her and spread their wings out and jump up and down, and Cheyenne would take off after them. They’d get up and fly 100 yards or so, land, then come right back up to the house, and they’d repeat this process till the cranes, or Cheyenne tired of it.

Well this would take place daily. Then it went a step further and Deb and I would just be in stitches at how these animals interacted. It got to the point they looked forward to these play times. If Cheyenne wasn’t outside, those dern cranes would walk up to the house, come up on the porch and start pecking the window in front of Cheyenne’s kennel inside the house.

I swear to you, with Deb as my witness, those birds would peck that window until we let Cheyenne out, and there they’d go again. Literally, it was hilarious! They actually pecked holes in the screen. We’d be inside piddling around and all of a sudden you’d hear, peck, peck, peck, and you knew Cheyenne’s buddies were back.

This is just one of the reasons Deb and I love living out of town. Honestly, there are times I wonder how we ever lived in town, what couple of times we have. We’ve sure been blessed in our lives. Not from a money standpoint, cause that sure isn’t the case, but from a quality of life standpoint, we couldn’t ask for a better way to live. God has blessed us.

Back to the pigs…

Well, the pigs will come and go. You won’t see them for a while, sometimes quite a while, then, all of a sudden…they’re here again. This is the case now. We’ve seen signs on and off, but up until now, they’d not been rooting up the pasture.

With this being the case, it’s time to trap those dudes. So, we’ve been building a trap/pen. We’ll have this finished today. We’ll be building the gates and a feed trough, and the pen is done.

What we did is buy some bull panels, and are using these for the pen perimeter. We set posts every 4 feet for strength. The bull panels are 4’ high, by 16’ long, and are built from heavy gauge wire and will last for a long, long while. Thus, a onetime build and you’re done.

We may change it around from time to time to fit our needs, or to make the pen work better to our preference. We’re flexible is what I call it, but Deb claims it’s not really flexible, but merely not knowing what we were doing from the git go. Ain’t it nice to be loved?

Here I went and “liberated” her so many years back from being a dern ole “country bumpkin,” and I have one buddy that claimed Deb lived SO far out in the woods he nicknamed her… “Punkin Junction!”

Her family lived back out in the woods, and they didn’t have a home telephone. Well, actually they did, but they had to go outside and shimmy up the telephone pole TO use it! I talked with her several times back when we were dating, and couldn’t understand what she was trying to say.

The reason for this was quite simple. The higher up the pole you went, the more the wind blew. The icing on the cake for me was the time we’d just spoken over the phone, and had set up a dinner date down at the “Bucket A Blood Saloon and Eatery.” I waited nearly two hours on her to show up, but still…no Deb.

I knew the rest of her family had gone up to Florida State Prison to visit with her grandmother as it was visitin day. I was kinda worried because I didn’t know if she’d had an accident or not, or possibly even slipped and fell off the dern phone pole??

Well the whole way over there I was concerned about her whereabouts, and it was cold, cold, and the wind was blowing to beat the band. As soon as I pulled up I saw the problem. It was so cold, and she was up in the air so high…her phone was frozen solid to her ear…she couldn’t get down.

Deb hollered down wondering how I could get her ear free with the weather as cold as it was? I hollered up, “No sweat honey, I’ve got an idea. You just hang on a minute, and I’ll have you down.”

So I shimmied up the other side of the pole, got up there beside her…and snipped the line where the phone attached to it. SHE WAS FREE…although she hit the ground pretty hard droppin down off that pole.

I believe the only thing that saved her was…she landed on her head, which is the hardest part on her. Plus she landed on the side of her head the phone was frozen to, and I believe that helped to break her fall.

I decided right then that I’d get her out of that mess and go ahead and marry her. YET, she considers MY flexibility to be, just not knowing what I was doing the first time around?? Between you guys and me…I ain’t ever had no phone frozen to MY ear, 20 feet off the ground! LOL!

Back to the pigs once again, I cain’t seem to stay focused this morning, we are building it 16 feet wide and 32 feet long. We’ve dug the bull panels down about eight inches to keep them from rooting out…I hope. If not, we’ll dig back around it and run something a little deeper to stop them from this.

We’ll put a dividing panel half way down, which will in essence give us two pens. We’ll add a gate in one corner of the dividing panel corner for a couple reasons.

First it will enable us to separate the pigs when we work them. This being worm shots or whatever, plus will allow us to cut the boar hogs one at a time, with no danger of the other pigs being able to get to you.

Secondly, once we catch a few pigs, but others are close by, we can put the pigs we’ve already caught in the back pen. By doing this it will allow us to bait up the front pen and catch more pigs. We believe the other pigs penned up in the back pen will help draw other pigs into the pen. We’ll see here pretty quickly. Now Deb, this is again being what I like to call…flexible! Dern women!

What we’ll be doing is putting a trap door in the front of the pen that lifts up. This we’ll leave tied up the first night or two until they find the corn and get used to coming in through the trap door, although it will be tied up.

By doing this, we’re hoping to let the pigs adjust to going in the pen, and by leaving it tied up for a night or two, they’ll get used to coming and going as they please. Also, this should allow most of the pigs to come in as a group. This way, when we do set the trap door, hopefully we’ll catch the whole bunch instead of just a couple. We’ll see.

Anyway, after catching them, we’ll feed them out to butcher later.

Here’s three video’s this morning for you, and we hope you enjoy them. The first is a quick look at what’s left in our garden, then a quick look at the cows. The second two are pertaining to the pigs. The first showing where they’ve been rooting up the pastures, and the second showing the construction of the pen.
We’ll try to also get a video in the next day or two of the finished trap/pen, and how it works.

Thank you guys for stopping by again, and God Bless you and yours. Deb says to please keep a smile on your face, and one in your heart!

Dub and Deb

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3 Responses to Those Dern Pigs Have Gone and Done It Now!

  1. Sandra says:

    See Dub and Deb making some lemonade out of some wild lemons. Question.
    Do you have a permit or license, has Peta been around. FDA been notified or even EPA, have you paid the proper fees for new business venture so city state and Fed can
    collect revenuses from you. Have you checked zoning regulations. Noise pollution levels. I could go on and on but you know how it is. This ain’t 1900, it’s 2011 and everybody is in your business. Next thing you know the OWS will be in your yard
    living in tents with something new to protest. JUST SHOOT THEM!!!
    Not the OWS the Hawgs. Laughing at you guys. Smiling in my heart. Chuckle, chuckle, tee hee.

    • admin says:

      Actually Sandra, the Turnpike Authority is making us put a counter on the gate door. There’ll be a charge of 25 cents every time a pig enters, this to be paid at the end of every month…NO checks!

      Wild lemons? More like wild “mountain oysters!” Once we catch a few boar hogs, those mountain oysters will be literally fallin from the sky! Not from very high up, mind you, but they’ll still be droppin from the sky…right into a bucket. I can’t wait until this starts. Deb has already said that when we start collectin our wild mountain oysters, she’ll “convince” our daughter-in-laws to start diggin around in the bucket of oysters with their hands! Why?

      Lookin for “Pearls!”

      Don’t let that little coy smile of Deb fool you guys…she’s a real rounder at heart! You gotta watch her 24-7 or, she’ll pull the wool over your eyes!

      Glad you got a smile goin this mornin, Mississippi! Deb says keep one in your heart too!

  2. Sandra says:

    Loving every bit of this. If you find any “pearls” save me one. Sure beats the depressing news I read everyday.
    Pickled Pigs Feet (use the same recipe for the lips)
    Souse
    Chittlins’ (fried and boiled)
    Hocks
    Haslet (you gotta ask me for this recipe, in olden times it was called innards stew)
    Sorry, I don’t have a recipe for the Oink
    ‘scuse my previous spelling I can claim old age for that and no spell check.

    If you did not grow up in the very deep South you would never know any of these
    delish recipes. And could not properly say Y’all. Smiling.

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