I have been using a small, battery powered, electric wire around my garden successfully for 4 years. The shock is pretty mild and won't kill anything - but if you touch it you will say 'ouch' outloud. You put up your regular fence and run the electric wire on plastic posts all the way around, just outside the fence. I have it doubling back and forth so it's one long wire at 1' high, 4' high, and 10' high. We had a family of groundhogs under the back deck two summers ago. They stayed out of the garden until one day when I saw the whole family in there eating the lettuce and peas. After chasing them out I discovered that the batteries had gone dead in the charger. I replaced the batteries and no more problems. It even works against deer. Turns out the deer will try to push under a fence first. As soon as they try that they get a shock to their nose and take off. We are in the woods with a large deer population and we have no deer in our garden! The charger I use is the Fi-Shock SS-2D, catalog # CH-02 at http://www.mrmcgregorfence.com/products/parts/energizers.htm It runs on 2D batteries for about 3 months. You can get just the charger and buy posts and wire locally, or you can get a whole kit from Mr. McGregor's Fence. I highly recommend this, it's the only way I can garden in the woods. Here is a link that might be useful: Electric Garden fence

Ww have wild or feral hogs here in southwest Washington County Arkansas also. The first showed up about 12 years ago. Sow had a litter between the rows of hay stored outside. In 12 years they have over-run the territory. Biggest issue is the destruction of pastures and hay medows. We have trapped and either sold or butchered dozens each year for the past several years. Hunters usually bring the numbers down during deer season. But with no real natural preadators, their numbers continue to climb. For our area, the true Razorback has been extinct for a very long time. What we are seeing are domistic animals turned feral. They have migrated here or been hauled in. I live 1 mile from the national forest. Nothing between me and Fort Smith but Lee Creek. Hogs will turn feral quicker than any other animal. About 3 generations is all it takes, or less than 5 years. Had the same issue with the armidilo many years back. We would go out on a sunny warm winter day and have killed up to 30 in an afternoon. They would come out on days like that and were easy to spot in the sun shine as they dug around in the pastures. It took several years to get their numbers down enough that a man didn't have to spend a couple weeks filling holes in his hay medows. Bears arn't that big a problem here. Had a teenager tear into our Church/community building a couple of times. Game and Fish asked us to wait until spring to see if the youngster would move on, if not they would trap him. And move on he did. I still see one or two a year. Supposed to be cats here as will. I've never seen one, but others have. All in all, those hogs are the worst all the way around. More dangerous, more destructive and by far more difficult to control. Good Luck folks.....

There are traps that work quite well with feral hogs. If your are in the city limits you cannot shoot them, so traps are your only choice for do it yourself options. The city may have a destructive pest control program, so I would give them a call first. If they come around often, poison is an option, although you run the risk of killing other animals. But in all truth, feral hogs are on the rise and are only going to get worse. It is a losing battle in the end. They have been trying to eradicate the feral hog in Israel for thousands of years and they are still there. Pigs are one of the smartest and most versatile animals in the world. But hey, they taste good. So if the economy crashes, you have food in your front yard! Might not be such a bad thing.

Molly, speaking of paving stones, I have some areas in my yard 'paved' with mulch. It's on the sides of the house, in back of the store room, under the trees along the fence line, plus in all the flower beds and as a topping for plants in pots so they can be watered with the hose without the soil splashing out. In all these places it eventually disintegrates into compost and then I add some more on top. I've been lucky enough to catch the tree trimmers and ask them to dump their ground up limbs nearby in a vacant area where I can get it in a wheel barrow, but you could have some hauled in. I apply it pretty thick and no weeds have ever grown through it. It looks fine to me, like a forest floor, and doesn't need watering. I know you have to keep the grass in certain places, but in other places on your large property where you don't want grass or flower beds you could just mulch it. An interesting thing about the mulch where it was dumped in a long pile about a foot or two deep is that it's still moist from the rains we had weeks and weeks ago. So it really does preserve moisture if applied thick enough. I apply it about 5 or 6 inches deep and then settles down a bit. It burns up a lot of calories hauling that much stuff in a wheel barrow :-)