Is more fun with family.
At 5 AM I was out in the field tying down this inside corner. It was a tough job, getting all the thirteen longitudinal wires pulled back against the wood post. There was just too much tension, not all of them got pulled back. I will probably revisit this in warm weather after the wires have had a chance to relax a little bit.
The 100 foot length of fence on the northeast side was short by about 18 inches, so there wasn’t enough wire to wrap around the wooden post and tie off. I spent the last few minutes before breakfast adding a doubled-over length of tie wire to the end of each longitudinal wire.
After breakfast Seppi and Daddy clamped half of the tie wires and hooked up the come-along.
Let the tightening begin. Once the fence was stretched we wrapped the unclamped wires around the post and tied them off.
Then detached the clamps…
And tied off the rest of the wires. At this point, Seppi became very “told” and had to borrow Daddy’s flanned over his own raincoat.
Next we started rolling out the long 200 foot rolls for the center fence section. This is a very heavy roll of wire. Daddy and Seppi rolled out one of them, while Uncle Adam anchored the far end of the other roll and rolled it down to the middle of the field, where we spliced the two of them together.
We stood the fence up, and began to stretch it, as best we could. It was a difficult process, and there were some hiccups. One of the come-along’s broke and the other one was at max capacity, so we paused and anchored.
It was ticklish business, so we didn’t get around to getting any pictures of that part. When the dust settled and the fence was anchored at a not-quite-end-of-run anchor (the end of the fence sits over the pipes running to the septic drain field, so we didn’t want to sink a bunch of holes there). The anchor is 25 feet from the gate. It takes the tension from the stretching of the main run of the fence, and then a second short section was spliced in and stretched to the gate.
While this was going on, Uncle Adam began putting in the wire clips that fastened the fence to the T-posts.
That was a tedious business, but had to be done.
Finally, hanging the gate, and just like that…
The north pasture is fully fenced in.
Maybe. We might run a line of electric fence down the top of the fence so we have something to clip the temporary fence to so we don’t have to rely on solar chargers. Although the solar charger we have been using for the last winter seems to have worked well enough, but… it hasn’t been tested by large animals, e.g. pigs, sheep, cows or goats.
Little Farm in the Big City 