Christmas Preparations…

One of our pigs -- Kerry -- is due to farrow on December 24^th – or thereabouts.

She has got really heavy and I'd better get ready for the big event

What we need now is a place for her to farrow.

I've read that close to the time her nest-building instinct will kick in.

Well, my nesting instinct kicked in today, as I was putting the finishing touches on her new hut. I nearly moved in myself.

All through the building process I had no fixed ideas on how it should be built, and they kept evolving.

A farrowing hut not only needs to keep out wind and rain.
As there is a danger of a sow's lying down on top of piglets by mistake, it also needs to have a place the piglets can escape into. This is often achieved by installing metal bars, just the size for a piglet to slip under, along the walls of a farrowing pen.
I decided to go for an A-frame design, so that piglets can escape into the low angle of the wall if need be.

I was prepared to put a fair amount of work into this building, so that it could become a place for the piglets to live for as long as we keep them.

At first I had decided to build the hut from recycled building timber. When I cleared the site between the trees, I realized that I had plenty of building materials right there to hand, and could save myself carrying all that timber from far away!

To keep the building off the damp ground, I built a kind of pallette - a raft foundation, one might say - out of woven spruce branches (same techniques as I use for paths).

Using Spruce logs, I then put up a skeleton A-frame, to which I added ribs -- or rafters. I fixed all these together by tying them with string, but later added nails, as I was using freshly cut logs, and wasn't sure if they would shrink much and thereby loosen the ties.

I had planned to add horizontal ribs to act as support for plastic sheeting, which I would weigh down by tying down some natural material easily to hand, such as spruce branches or heather (for aesthetic and for durability reasons).

After felling the trees for the frame (Aebhric helped me; we used the two-man handsaw), I was left with a lot of spruce branches.

So when I looked around for options for the ribs, it seemed natural to use those, and the easiest way to fix them in place was to weave them through the ribs.

Weaving is a great option for fixing and strenghtening any structure, especially an irregular, organic one. Nails split timbers and require a good deal of strength. Ties can loosen over time. Screws can be a good solution, but seem a bit out of place in a rustic structure. Weaving literally goes with the flow.

When that was done, I got a bit side-tracked interior-decorating the hut, and nearly moved in myself during a wintry hail shower: In my quest for spruce trees earlier, I had had to cut some heather, and I spent some time pushing individual sprigs into the weave from the inside. Given a big supply of heather, one could end up with a beautiful draft-proofing inside finish.

I'm not sure what shape Kerry's nesting instinct will take, but I can imagine her pulling on anything loose in her quest for nesting material, so I won't bother with that for now.

So far, the hut was far from weatherproof.

Aebhric, my husband, teaches how to build a 'debris hut' during some of his bushcraft classes.

The basic idea is to arrange any type of natural material in a thatch-like way around an A-frame just large enough to crawl into. If well build, this will keep you warm and dry for the night. There are many different ways to go about this, depending on time, materials to hand, and also on how long one expects to use it.

I had build one once before, and slept fairly warm and dry in a forest in Oregon.

Now, as I contemplated putting some cushioning material between the spruce branches and the plastic sheeting, so that it would not get punctured, I thought back to that experience, and decided to risk it:

I would not use any plastic, but instead rely on the rainproofing effect of a very thick layer of spruce branches.

Getting enough branches for this, proved to be quite a big job, but arranging the branches like a thatch over the A-frame was very satisfying work.

Starting at the bottom, I stuck the ends of the branches into the woven framework. I worked my way up to the top adding as much branches as possible, all pointing downwards.

The whole was finished off with a 'cap' of large branches, which effectively tie down all the others. These are tied together at the apex, and sewn into the structure with string lower down.

Now the hut is rainproof (will report back on exact degree of this...), and quite draft proof (except maybe in a storm).

To minimise wind coming in through the entrance, I fixed spruce branches and heather in such a way that they protect the opening.

--- Update, ten days later: We had a whole day's flood-like rain, and eventually some drops of rain worked their way through, but mostly near the sides, towards the bottom.
...And these pigs are forest pigs, after all. They are used to a few drops of wet!