Sunday, May 9, 2010

Bring on the fence posts

Is it bad that I'm looking forward to going to work on Monday to rest? Let's just say, we hit it pretty hard this weekend and made a decent amount of progress to show for it. In between the donkey stories from Jenna's posts, you may have gleaned that our focus right now is to get that interior fence up. We need to be able to separate the animals. They are just too curious and annoying for their own good. So, we started putting in some H-posts every ~300 feet, and this weekend we put in all but one of the cedar support posts in the first 300 foot section. We're using cedar logs from a lot of the trees I've been massacring over the last year and half. In between the cedar posts, I'll be putting t-posts in which will give me spans of about 10 feet between posts. Later we'll be putting up field fencing, probably goat/sheep fence since goats are probably in the cards for the future. The cedar posts went in pretty well. This is another testament to how amazing Bambi (read: technology) is. With the help of a family friends auger connected to Bambi's back side, I was able to drill about 17 holes this weekend. Some were drilled in about 2 minutes, but others took an hour or so of drilling, cleaning out rocks, breaking up clay, and re-drilling. That rock bar gets pretty heavy after a couple of these holes. Hence the desire to get back to my desk job to rest up. Back to the technology is cool statement, my appreciation is even stronger because of a discussion with my grandfather last weekend. I was explaining my plan, and he started to tell me about all of the fence post holes he had dug by hand when he was a kid. Screw that.





Jenna did most of the tamping, so those posts are solid!







All in all, a pretty good, productive weekend. And on another positive note, no snakes this weekend. :)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

How far apart are your T-posts relative to the cedar posts? I'm watching with interest...there is fencing in our future, too.

Btw, our neighbour rented an augur to do his and told us that with all the rocks he could have done it by hand in the same amount of time. We do have very rocky subsoil here. So I may be doing things GrandDad style!

jer said...

The cedar posts are ~20 feet apart, so when we put T-posts in between we'll have about 10 foot spacings between supports. I read spacing should be 8-10 feet between supports, so I'm on the upper end of that range. I just didn't feel like adding 20% more posts. :)