If you have never put up livestock fences, you are missing a lot… of hardships, that is. The kids and Jaime decided we had to have ponies, and a few cows for meat and, maybe, extra milk. So we set about planning out some fences to keep the animals in and varmints out. Turns out we needed almost 2,400 feet of fencing. I was not ready for this job….

As usual, I consulted several good sources before getting too far into the planning, and made sure we built something that would still be viable for generations to come, I did not want to be doing this again anytime soon just from reading stories.

What I ended up following was the local amish way of building fences, we used 8″ main posts, 6″ brace posts, 4″ horizontals, and 9 gauge twitch wire. We spent a full day with the auger drilling holes, dropping posts into the earth, and filling and tamping everything just as tight as it can possibly be. Then I spent half a day securing the twitch wires and tightening the braces all up.

Once this was done, Jaime and I went about measuring out the spacing for the T-Posts between the main posts at 10 foot intervals, then went about spending a day setting those 7 foot steel posts to an out-of-the-ground height of 4.5 feet. If you have never used a t-post sledge, it is a wonderful tool. If I had to do that all using a regular sledge hammer, it would have taken a week at least to get it done.

Once all the t-posts were set, I went ahead and drilled and mounted the hinges for the two 8 foot gates we had purchased. That was an easy enough task as it turned out.

Tomorrow we string 4 strands of barbed wire, and a top strand of 2″ white, electricified horse tape. The kids should be able to have the 2 ponies we made a deal for delivered this coming weekend. Yay!

This saga is continued in: Fencing: part 2.

Subscribe via RSS feed.

Tags: barb fence, barb wire, fence, fenced, fences, fencing, woven fence, woven wire

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 4:03 pm and is filed under Homesteading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.