The Year of the Fence

So this past year has been a busy one around the farm. (Of course what year isn’t a busy one on a farm?) This year has definitely been the Year of the Fence, as the whole family has been engaged all year in putting up various fencing around the farm.

We started with a 8 foot tall fence around our 6000 square foot garden space. We used 12’ long 4'x4 posts sunk 3’ into the ground, spaced about 12’ apart, and built standard H-braces in the corners. That was a lot of holes to dig, all by hand with the post hole digger. For fencing we utilized the same 4’ tall goat and sheep fencing that we had already used in our goat barn areas. This worked OK, except we got some slight sagging on the bottom section of the fencing when we tensioned the upper section. I also built two, home made, 8’ tall gates that turned out functional, but not great.

From the garden we then moved on to our new orchard. I had ordered 12 apple trees and 4 pear trees and they had already been delivered. We planted them and I placed wire cages around each tree, but I wanted to get a 8’ tall fence up around the entire orchard to keep the deer out and away from my baby trees. So we replicated what we had done in the garden here in the orchard, with a few tweaks to improve on our previous fence project. This time the 8’ foot fence went up with a bit less sagging on the bottom section (we did not tension the upper sections as tightly) and instead of a home made gate, I purchased a tubular gate from Tractor Supply and hung that in the 8’ wide gate opening.

Finally, from the orchard we moved on to the chicken area. Last winter we had an issue with a coyote killing a chicken every few days. We quickly threw up some wielded wire fencing on T-posts enclosing a decently sized area. This stopped the coyote, but I was not satisfied with this ugly fence and the small sized area this gave our chickens, when compared to the free ranging area they had previously enjoyed. So once again the whole family jumped into fencing mode. We put in 8’ tall round posts in the corners, in H-brace format, and T-posts as line posts. We then ran the 4’ sheep and goat fencing around 4/5 of the new and larger chicken area. We still have a small section near the house to finish. Which I will do if it will ever stop raining every other day. Eventually, I plan on running at least 2 levels of electric wire fencing on the outside of the fence, one near the ground to prevent digging and one near the top to prevent a predator from climbing over the fence.

And once that project is done…well there is always the pasture fencing that needs to be done…but don’t tell the girls there’s still more fencing to do, they might just run away from home.