Retaining Wall Made From Used Hog Slats

Retaining Wall Made From Used Hog Slats HOG EQUIPMENT & IDEAS Hog Equipment & Ideas (351) 26-1-3 Jon and Tricia Blomgren, Alvord, Iowa, needed a retaining wall to keep soil from eroding away around a culvert that runs under their driveway. After he priced building materials and considered the life span of treated wood, Blomgren decided to rethink the idea. "I just couldn't get excited about doing all that work with wood and then having to do it over again in a few years," he says. Then he remembered some old concrete slats he'd removed while remodeling a hog building. The slats were 10 ft. long and tapered from 5 1/2 in. wide on the top to 4 in. wide at the bottom. Figuring the slats would stay in place better and last longer than wood, he decided to use them. He drove creosote-treated railroad ties into the ground as posts to hold the wall in place and then laid the slats into a straight vertical wall. The base length of one side of the wall is 13 ft., so, using a chop saw, he cut 3-ft. lengths from some slats to add to the 10-ft. full length slats. The wall tapers up toward the culvert, so shorter lengths were needed as he built it higher, so he ended up cutting several slats. "The wall had to be about 6 ft. high, tapering down to just 2 ft. on one side of the culvert. On the other side, we made it 4 ft. tall and tapered down to even with the ground," he says. Blomgren says the slats were easy to work with and made an attractive, inexpensive wall. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Jon and Tricia Blomgren, 1945 Dove Ave., Alvord, Iowa 51242 (ph 712 473-2153; E-mail: jon@farmcountrytrader.com).

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