Saturday was dedicated to more fencing. The goal is to get enough fence up around field #1 to let the animals into it. So the Apprentice and I loaded up the pickup and Kubota and headed out to get some actual fence installed. We rolled out the first 55 feet of fence, stretched it, put the T post clips on and then needed to install the wooden stays. I let the Apprentice use the DeWalt fence stapler and after she pulled the trigger a couple of times she said “that has some kick” and did not really want to staple anything with it. So when she held the first wooden stay and I ran the stapler she complained of pain and stinging from the stapler (it hurts). So she found a large old wooden fence post and she leaned that against the wooden stay then put her body weight onto the wooden buffer and had no more problems. She rolled out 330’ of woven wire along side the T posts and when we got to the next H brace we realized that it had not been completed. There was no X of tightened smooth wire in place. We left the smooth wire at the house because we thought we had done all of the X’s.
This necessitated a change in tasks so we went to installing T posts with the tractor. We did pretty good until we got near the end and then we started to bend the posts into a U shape. We fixed this by clearing the grass debris away from the post insertion site and I used a pounding technique with the bucket instead of a steady downward pressure. This got all of the T posts into the ground.
I decided to call it a day and we headed out of field #1, but when we got to the gate I realized that not having a direct gate into the field from the wheat field side is just horrible. It makes for this long convoluted route to get into field #1. So I stopped, had the Apprentice go grab one of the unused gates and three railroad ties to bring back, it took a couple of trips and some finagling on her part but she got all of the stuff to the needed spot. I took the John Deere tractor and tried to drill three large 12” holes into the gate opening I had fenced off. I managed it eventually but each hole took 10-15 minutes to drill out. I also realized that the hydraulic fluid leak is worse than I had guessed as the auger got stuck down into the hole with the 150# weight I had on the auger. I added three old tractor weights to the top arch and it makes the auger work even when the ground is hard. So I had to remove said weights to get the auger to come out of the hole. On a plus note, at least we dug out the main batch of holes with the six inch auger first. This saved us a bunch of time. So now the holes are dug and we just need to clean them out, set some posts, put in some wire X supports and then hang a gate. I was so glad to be done for the day.
Stewart Creek Somethings 