If you’ve ever put up fencing on a farm, then you know the work is never done – ever.  We’ve been working on putting up our fencing, for, I’d say, about 3 years now.

First we ordered the posts – 600.  Yes, 600.  Good God.

Then we rented a post hole digger.  A walk-behind, one-man post hole digger.  We managed to dig about 3 holes with that.  Tons of muscle, lots of sweat, and even more cursing.  We looked up and we still had 597 holes left to dig.

So, we called the rental place and reordered a skid steer with an auger.  Not cheap, but that worked much better.  We got about half the holes dug with that but on the second day it started leaking some kind of fluid.  So, back it went.

Then we decided to buy an auger attachment for the tractor.  Also not cheap.  That had a super-chewer blade at the end.  The problem was, every hole or two, a bolt broke if you weren’t super careful.  And we were super careful, but the bolts snapped anyway.  Turns out this is a safety measure.  With too much pressure, bolt breaks first and then if you keep going the whole thing explodes and no more auger attachment.  So, Kevin bought 547 bolts and kept changing them out.

 

Running out of time, we rented a mini skid steer from Home Depot, so we’d have two people digging holes as we still had about 200 to go.  That worked pretty well.  So, slowly, but surely, we got all the holes dug.  (sorry, no pics of the mini skid steer)

So, now we’ve got roughly 500ish poles in the ground.  We are putting coated wire (to be electrically charged) on the top and bottom of each post, threaded through these plastic thingys.  No idea if they have an official name.  So we screwed in roughly 3,246 plastic thingys.  My math could be slightly off here.

Then we strung the coated wire.

 

Then we drilled holes in the middle of those two wires, to insert more cord that isn’t electrically charged.  That’s roughly 3,246 holes drilled.

Then we strung that cord.  Or we are in the process of doing that.  This week we will finish threading, tighten and electrify – – –  To be continued. . .