Posts Tagged ‘fence maintenance’
Mixed Result
My mind continues to linger on the shade sail project even though our contractor, Justin, won’t be available to do the post-installation until 10 days from today. I’d like to do as much preparation as possible before his hourly rate kicks in, so I decided to work on the leaning fence line yesterday.
The first thing I did was tie a guide string that indicates the straight line originally established for that length of fence. Then, I stood and stared at it for a long time, wondering how to go about the multiple steps that would be required.
- I knew I would be unscrewing horizontal boards from the posts.
- I wasn’t sure how to manage the pending curiosity from the horses.
- I was hoping to pull the uphill post that will end up being replaced by the new shade sail post.
- The other post to be replaced has a gate attached to it.
- Where do I put the gate when it has been removed?
- Can I temporarily put fence webbing to keep horses from trying to cross there?
- Maybe I could pull the other posts upright before pulling the gate post.
I opted for pulling the first post because that seemed the most straightforward. The only way I could imagine successfully extracting that post and persuading the rest of them to stand back up straight was to use the diesel tractor.
After wrapping a chain around the hook on the loader bucket and then the post to be pulled, the slight touch of the lever lifted that post flawlessly. That’s the way I wish all things worked.
Next, I moved the tractor back and wrapped a tie-down strap around the next post over to apply pressure against the weight of the tractor. I’m sure the come-along would have been the more appropriate choice, but it was up in the shop garage, and the strap was right there to grab. I’d already made more trips back and forth to get one more thing than my sanity in the moment wanted to tolerate.
I was able to bring the post in line and only lost a little of the upright level when releasing the pressure. Looked straight enough to the naked eye. Moving to one of the two most tipped posts, which happen to be on either side of the waterer, I repeated the routine with the strap.
That post offered much more resistance than the first one. I’m going to need to do a lot more digging in order to gain the inches needed to get it in line again.
It was getting close to feeding time for the horses, and I wanted to get everything put away before starting that process. That meant repeating the routine of trips back and forth to carry all the stuff I had brought out throughout the hours of trying one thing after another to achieve my goal.
I made enough progress in the end to feel successful about my efforts, although I didn’t realign as many posts as I hoped. Luckily, I have plenty more days to fiddle around with this before the sail frame installation officially gets underway.
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Underwhelming Opening
It was what one local meteorologist called a “San Diego weather” day for our region yesterday. Blue sky, light breeze, gentle warmth, comfortable humidity, few in the way of pestering insects. Julian graciously agreed to help me pound fence posts that our freeze/thaw cycle pushes up. 
It’s very rewarding to experience easy success when a post drops a half-inch with each strike, especially because plenty of others barely move an eighth of an inch at a time. Our main goal is to get the bottom wire of the fence back down to less than 18” from the ground, per a guideline I read for horses. Mission accomplished.
In the middle of the afternoon, Cyndie agreed to open the gates to the hay field for the horses to start adjusting their digestive systems to fresh grass again. I took a position to record their reaction to renewed access to their fields.
They didn’t even notice. Maybe they were purposely ignoring us. My video was pretty underwhelming. With a little coaxing from Cyndie, Mia and Mix started an approach. As they picked up some momentum down the slope from the barn, Light and Swings took notice and soon followed.
They barely walked beyond the wood fence to begin feasting on fresh chomps of grass. Nothing wrong with that, but we always compare it to the time they took off running like the racehorses they once were upon that first opportunity on the field in spring.
We only gave them a short first shift before bringing them back in. Interestingly, that got them running more than going out did.
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Temporary Reprieve
Yesterday morning’s wintery start was a bitter pill to swallow but the afternoon arrived with just enough sunshine to make the snow nothing but a memory.
We get a day or two of reprieve from a threat of more snow until the chances go up again by Friday. Ooh, I can’t wait… said no one ever about more snow in April.
Last week I pulled the inserts out of my insulated work boots and transferred them to my non-insulated boots. I didn’t switch them back just because of one little snowstorm and wore my summer boots to feed the horses at the start of the day. It proved to me how well my insulated boots work in keeping my feet warm. It didn’t take long for me to get cold feet in the non-insulated boots.
If you look closely at the fence in the image above there are clues of a spring project that is high on my priority list. The fence in the foreground is leaning from what I fear may be the weight of horses leaning into it to scratch their itches. In the board fence near Light in the distance, there is a high post that needs to get pounded down. Actually, there are a lot of posts that deserve to be pounded down. They get pushed up by the freezing and thawing cycle.
I’d love to have the ease of simply pressing on the posts with the weight of the loader bucket on the diesel tractor but the ground is too soft for driving that heavy machine around. It would do more damage than good. That leaves the task of hand-pounding with the tool I customized for just this purpose. All I need is a yardstick, a step ladder, and a spotter to read the pounding progress on the ruler.
As long as the post keeps moving, I keep pounding until we reach a target height. If it stops moving beneath my pounding, I need to save my energy and not waste effort that isn’t producing results. Some posts have moved easily in the past and others not so much.
Upper body workout ahead. Arms day is a-comin’.
It’s a great feeling when fence posts are all re-seated before the ground dries out and becomes rock hard again. Not that different from how it feels to have growing things trimmed and shaped prior to the spring growth spurts.
Everything in its time.
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That Close
I knew I might not finish trimming the grass along the fence line before the gas ran out but the closer I got, the more I hoped I might make it. My decision to leave the plastic gas can behind probably doomed my chances of not needing it.
There were one and a half lengths between posts left to cut out of the entire distance of our fencing when the motor sputtered out on me. Nothing to do but walk back to the shop garage and bring the gas can back with me.
We haven’t always been proactive about trimming the grass along the fence before it gets problematically tall, especially during the time when there were no horses on the property and we didn’t need the electricity activated. When the fence is electrified, contact with the growth around it puts a load on the circuit that pulls down the voltage.
The first time I used the power trimmer along the fence line, there were several areas where woodier stems of some plants would break the plastic cutting line. This time, around the entire length of our fences, I did not run into anything that the plastic line couldn’t cut. It was very rewarding to discover that we’ve been cutting it enough times now that there is no longer anything robust trying to grow under there.
It fits with what I was writing yesterday in that the job of keeping the growth off the fence is getting easier to manage over time. It would be just fine with me if eventually, nothing tried to grow beneath the fences and I didn’t need to cut it anymore.
I could intentionally neglect it. 🙂
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Posts Pounded
We made our way around the entire loop of our fencing yesterday, pounding posts back down that our winter freeze had pushed up. Two years ago, after we no longer kept horses inside the fence, I loosened some fence lines to see if that would reduce how much the corner posts appeared to come up.
I don’t think it made any positive difference, but before tightening the wires back up in preparation of turning the electricity on, I wanted to get all the corner posts back down. Most of them moved down multiple inches easily, but a few hardly budged.
We didn’t fuss over those.
If nothing more than psychologically satisfying, it felt like a worthy effort. We rewarded ourselves after all the work by immediately turning on the electricity to the fence wires.
The familiar “click-click-click” came on and the display ramped up to a respectable 12Kvolts energy. Mission Accomplished.
Almost.
I still need to walk the length and verify voltage is present on all sections.
Cyndie already identified three locations where some arcing is occurring, so I want to look into those in hope of solving the causes.
That situation is no different than what we dealt with regularly back when we previously had horses, so it feels perfectly acceptable for welcoming the arrival of our new 4-horse herd.
We are stoked! We’re expecting to receive delivery on Friday. Hopefully, that can be confirmed after today’s visit from This Old Horse.
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Fence Maintenance
I’ve tried a number of methods in dealing with fence posts that get pushed up by the freezing and thawing cycles that occur in our location. Our land has areas where the level of ground water sits just below the surface. It will drop during extended drought, but otherwise it doesn’t take much digging to reach moisture.
Every time it freezes, the water expands and the pressure slowly but surely pushes fence posts toward the sky.
Upon consultation with the owner of the company that originally installed our fencing, I learned that they would likely use a skid-steer tractor and press down with the hydraulic bucket. He suggested I save their time and my money and use the same method with my diesel tractor.
So, I did, and was amazed at how easily that pushed posts down. Almost too easy. It requires painstaking control and mental focus to avoid wreaking total havoc by overtaxing the limits of the posts or cross planks. One wrong slip and I risk doing much more damage than improvement.
There is one other complication with that method that pretty much stops me from even driving up to the fence. The ground in many of the areas of pushed up posts is so wet that my big tractor would sink into the mud and create an even messier problem to be solved.
That led me to desperately trying to simplify the task by just pounding down on the most obvious posts that had pushed up. Several different techniques to protect the post from damage and get the right angle and leverage all brought minimal results.
Yesterday spawned a new insight. I had a hand tool with a square steel pad for tamping soil that I figured would work to pound the top of the posts without damaging them. I also thought it wouldn’t hurt to add my 170 pounds of pressure to stand on a plank when slamming down on the top of a post.
The thing is, I couldn’t feel if it was doing any good. I enlisted Cyndie’s help to watch for progress, which ended up providing great encouragement when she would report how much it was working.
I was thrilled. Right up to the point the steel tamper began to shatter under the mis-use. I tried to carry on, but the loss of weight in the tool seemed to diminish progress. Another tool was needed. We don’t have a specific sledge hammer, but I contemplated rigging something to use the wood splitting maul for the purpose.
That’s when the next inspiration struck. I could modify the broken tamper to make it the handle of a weighty block of wood that would match the fence posts I was pounding.
Look out fence posts. Here I come.
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Relative Something 