Partial corral fence rebuild

Before my September accident I had plenty of fence rebuilds planned for the Fall.  I only got one fence rebuild done before the ground froze for the year. (I'm not counting the two minor fence fixes due to the bull breaking through the yard fence.) So lots of fence work was not done this Fall. Importantly the fence rebuild with a new gate between the toolshed and garage was not done even though the morning of the accident I had gotten the necessary gate and posts out for the planned rebuild start later that day.   With the ground frozen now this fence rebuild won't happen until next Spring.

But I was able over time this October and November rebuild part of the east corral fence.  This is a corral fence I first rebuilt way back in 2006 I believe.  It was before I got enough railroad ties to use as fence posts.  I rebuilt this corral fence over the previous mentioned fence (in the previous photo) because I wanted to rebuild this corral fence before weaning the calves in the corral.

After the rebuild in 2006.

After the rebuild was done this November.

As you can see I replaced four of the posts with railroad ties for posts.  I got rid of the small walk through gate I had built back then. Time was not too good for that gate.  I also replaced about a quarter of the split rails as time wasn't good for them either.  Because the cattle try to eat the walnut tree I made the fence section by the tree one rail taller.  I added wire fencing to the corral fence so the cattle wouldn't try to put their heads through the fence and also to protect the tree in that section of fence.

This fence rebuild was not a big effort,  Except I was still recovering from my September accident.  So the rebuild took more than two days to do.  While I normally can put three or four railroad ties in the ground as post fences in one day, surprisingly in my condition I was able to put two railroad ties in the ground in one day.  Maybe it was a bit too much for me to do as I had to wait a few days before I could work on the fence again.  This time I only put one railroad tie into the ground.  That is all I was able to do in October as a day or so later I had to put the calves in the corral to wean them.

A side effect of digging was that with each post I encountered more and more gravel as I dug.  No gravel for the first post closer to the loafing shed.  Mostly gravel by the third post.

Third fence post hole

As you can see in the previous photos, another thing I did was move the railroad tie posts into the corral a few feet.  That is because the gate was in a certain location.  I don't why the original fence builders had done it, but when starting at the well and water trough they moved the fence location out a few feet.  The fence went that way until the loafing shed where the last section angled a few feet back in to the loafing shed.   Now I wasn't rebuilding the fence all the way to the well, I wasn't even rebuilding the fence to the gate, and I certainly wasn't going to move the gate two feet.  But for the part of the fence I rebuilt I moved it over a few feet so the fence started at the loafing shed in a straight line.  I left the last two posts next to the gate.  So I angled the fence from the last railroad tie to the first original post near the gate.  In the meantime, since I wasn't done with the fence rebuild and I had calves in the corral now, I had to use an old metal gate to block the two foot gap between the old and new fence.  It worked as no calves got out of the corral.

After the calves were hauled to the livestock auction on October 30, I was able in November to finish my planned rebuild of this fence.  A challenge now was that it was freezing hard at night.  To dig the hole for the fourth railroad tie I had to break through three or four inches of frozen ground to get to unfrozen ground and dig the hole I needed for the post.

My finished fence rebuild

Higher rebuilt fence next to the walnut tree.

You can see how I got the rebuilt fence angled back to the gate.