Life among the Tall Pines: Two gates in hayfield fence

Friday, December 18, 2015

Two gates in hayfield fence

Several days of snow and it looks like - for sure - that this is the end of fencing for the year. I doubt the snow will melt till closer to Spring. On the corral split fence I did get the rest of the fence sections covered with the wire. I found pipes to add to the fence but the snow came before I could unscrew the dead submersible pump from one pipe and the fittings from the other pipes. Eventually I get around to it. Today I spent much of the day shoveling snow off the driveway and off part of the yard.

Now that I have a little time I can write about one other major fence rebuild I did earlier this year...

Back in July I rebuilt part of the hayfield fence. I replaced the last internal barb wire gate with a metal gate. This is between the hayfield and middle pasture. I also added a new metal gate to the south pasture / middle pasture corner where it meets the hayfield. In the past when I herded cattle between the south pasture and the hayfield, sometimes some of the cattle would go to the south pasture's NE corner instead of the gate in the middle. Now if they do that I can just open the gate in this corner.

It took me a week to replace the middle pasture gate, add the south/hayfield gate, and rebuild the fence between the gates. To ensure I finished before I had to let the cattle into the hayfield I even skipped hiking that Saturday. It was a good thing I skipped hiking that day as I only finished the fence work several hours before the cattle had to be moved.

Old fence and gate (the old barb wire gate is in front of the reddish metal gate laying down)

New fence and gate. (looks a little bit more sturdy, doesn't it?)

In the following photo are two railroad ties for the rebuilt fence. The wood pieces are a rotted post and another 'patch' board from the old fence. Usually I found the 'silver/white' metal t-post with a red cap to be 5 ft 6 inches long. Certainly in the ground it looked that short. (The metal post can also be seen in the first photo on the left side of the old gate.) But once I finally got the post out of the ground I found it to be 8 ft long. You can see half of the post was in the ground from the dirty coloration on the lower half. Apparently dad or the previous owners pounded the post halfway into the ground to make it even with the other posts. What a waste of a post.

In the end I was slowed down by a nest of black wasps or hornets who had a hole right under where I had to rebuild the fence to finish up work. You can see some of the wasps coming out of their hole just below the rock. I had placed the rock over their hole and the next day they had this new hole.