More behind the scenes things I've been working on but not blogging about in the last month or so.
It has been more than two years since DH and I last installed cross-fencing in my whole grand scheme of pastures that we put the perimeter fence around in summer of 2023. I've been operating on three pastures when there are supposed to be six. As a result, my three pastures got eaten down more last year than is really good/healthy for the grass and other plants growing in them. I'm hoping they rebound this spring okay.
Meanwhile, pasture #4 was supposed to get subdivided off the remaining large pasture chunk last year. Due to working on building the tack room (and how that took almost a whole year of off and on attention), fencing kept getting put off and put off and put off. Until the ground was frozen and we had to wait for things to thaw this year.
Finally (!!!) in March I picked a Saturday with a good weather forecast, confirmed with DH that he had no plans that would take him off the property that day, and went and bought all the wooden posts we would need for three more gates and any interior corners. Then when the chosen March Saturday arrived, we put the auger on the tractor, and installed all 9 of those wooden posts. Hooray!
Two days later, on Monday, DH was working from home and finished up all his meetings early enough in the afternoon that we went out and worked on driving in t-posts on the (short) fencelines that contained the wooden gate posts we'd installed on Saturday. We only spent an hour outside working on that before it was time for me to do dinner feed, but we got both of those lines done.
Then more than a week went by without working on the new fencelines. Work, weather, family, among other things, all got in the way. But the next Wednesday DH was done with work early enough, and the weather favorable enough (not warm, but at least not raining or snowing) that we were able to spend about an hour and half putting in the fence posts that make the long dividing line between pastures four and five. The ground was rather soggy from rain overnight the night before, but that made it really easy to drive the t-posts.
Which left just a dividing fence line between pastures 5 and 6 that needed posts installed. It wasn't as long as the 4/5 pasture line and DH actually did about half of that himself on the morning of Good Friday while I was cleaning stalls. When I was done with stalls, I helped him put up the tensioners as well as the wood posts that are the horizontal braces between the posts the gates are hung on and their supporting posts.
Saturday was a rainy day, which made it perfect for making a run to the (40 minute away because the local one didn't have the right type of stuff) farm store for the 1.5" electric fence tape, t-post insulator caps, and the insulators that go on the t-posts to hold the two lower rows of electric fence tape, as well as jump wires, end insulators (that go on the wooden posts), etc that are needed to electrify the new fence we would be running.
Unfortunately that farm store didn't have everything that we needed, namely the end insulators or the jump wires, but we were able to pick up everything else. With a few not-raining days the following week, and a little bit of time each day to work on it, DH and I got all of the insulators and caps put on the t-posts.
In order to make sure the insulators were properly spaced on the t-posts so that our rows of fencing didn't end up all wonky during the run, we used a story pole. It's just a 6-ish foot tall piece of 2"x2" oak we've had for a long time (since having some oak logs milled for boards to trim out the interior of the house in the early 2000's) that has colored tape wrapped around it at certain distances. Turned yellow-tape-down it tells us where on the t-post to put the insulators. Turned white-tape-down it shows us the height of the tops of the t-posts when driving those into the ground. A very handy homemade tool.
DH stopped and got those end insulators that go on the wooden posts one day after work, and we got those installed, plus ran all the electric tape the following Saturday. Still needed to find jump wires to buy, and also to install the gates.
Kinda looks like a fence now!
On that Sunday, we had DS1's five kids for a few hours in the afternoon. The weather was good, so we had them help us install gates. I snapped this picture of the boys, drafted into carrying tools for DH. Gonna make farm boys outta them!
While Tractor and Rascal mostly were tasked with holding or handing tools to DH as needed, Toad got to have instruction on gate-hanging and was given the job of checking to see if the gate was level before the final tightening of hinge bolts.
Both Toad and K3 got to help lift/hold the gates in place while DH secured them on the hinges.
Nice looking gates!
Then came more rain. So soggy everywhere. I had been hoping to pull back the sod and install gravel pads at the new gates, but it's definitely been too wet to drive the tractor in there lately. I'd rather wait on that than have deep tractor-tire width ruts in the pastures. So we decided to install the gate latches,
installing the latch on pasture 5
at which point we discovered that the gates for pastures 4 and 6 don't have enough room to put latches! Somehow, when setting those posts DH's measurments did not translate to drilling the post hole in the exact correct spot! Rather than inside edge to inside edge, he took that inside-to-inside measurment and made it on-center. So, we will need to pull and reset the two posts that the gates latch to. (Smack head. Ageing is not for the faint of heart.)
More rain, and the ground still too wet to pull and reset posts, so we used a not-raining but still very soggy hour to put up the boards that go between the hinge posts and the brace posts. This makes a barrier so the horses don't try to scoot through there even with the tensioner and wires running diagonally through that space. This is instead of trying to run two very short rows of electric tape between the gate posts (and the dilemma of how to electrify that short section that is 'cut off' from the electric fence on the opposite side of each gate.)
This past Sunday we finished up pasture 5 by installing the jump wires that connect the cross-fencing to the existing hot tape on the perimeter fence, thus electrifying the new runs of fencing in those sections. When shopping for the jump wire components, DH still has not been able to purchase all that we need (not in stock at the farm stores right now in the amount we need) but he was able to get enough that with a little modification we were able to make the cross fences of pasture 5 hot.
Which means that pasture #5 is now ready to graze!
This week is supposed to be much drier than last week, with only a few chances at scattered rain, not the torrential and almost daily ran of the week+ prior. Which means that hopefully we can get those in-the-wrong-spot gate latch posts on pastures 4 & 6 rectified and, fingers crossed, also get ahold of and install jump wires on the remaining new fence section too. I'd love to finish out the month with all six pastures operable (and the three that were heavily used last year able to rest for a month or so.)
