Relative Something

While I was in having lunch yesterday, the buried electric lines were marked with flags and paint. I had been watching for them the whole morning while I was down cutting tree branches along the planned new fence line near our southern border. Nothing happened. I walked out of the house after lunch and —boom— there were the red flags. It was magic!

It’s a good thing we thought to have the wires marked, because they don’t run in a straight line at all, and my planned gate location was right over them. I moved in a bit.

Having the electrical lines marked instantly changed my afternoon itinerary. It was time to put up some temporary fence so the horses can graze on the north side of our driveway. The first thing I wanted to do was bury a couple of wood posts so we could hang a gate. The rest of the fence will be pounded t-posts. I dug about a foot and a half down and water appeared!

I set the post in the hole and hung the gate on it, just to see if there might be a way to make it work. Then I called our fence guy and he confirmed that I needed to come up with a different plan for a gate. I’ll rig up something using t-posts and the webbed fence line. That meant I was on to pounding posts.

That is one heck of a workout. I was pounding posts all afternoon. Everything was laid out for me from the preparation work we did on Sunday, which helped smooth the routine out a bit, however I ended up making a couple changes to the route.

We think the horses will like it. There are a lot of evergreen trees scattered through half of this space, and I moved the fence to include a variety of other overgrown areas. It will give them some places to explore, in addition to the areas of lush grass they will be able to graze.

Since this fenced area of grazing is remotely located, we will have to escort them on a lead line to move them in and out of it, as opposed to the other spaces we have where we can just open a gate from their paddock. I’m considering rigging up a line with something hanging off it every 6 feet that I could hang across our driveway to create a visual barrier to help confine them to the direction we want them to go. We DON’T want them getting away from us and heading down the driveway.

We still need to buy a device to allow us to electrify the fence, since it is on the other side of the driveway from our existing system. Legacy has proved that he will mess with pretty much everything he can get his mouth on. A little electric shock potential does wonders to help him mind his manners. Until the white webbing is electrified, we will not be able to leave them in there unsupervised for any extended amount of time.

It will be tempting for me to try to put them over there during the day today, but I will wait until Cyndie can be present for their initial introduction to this new space. That will allow us to move them in pairs, which will make them a little more comfortable while they learn a different way of getting to this new grazing space.

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