I realized tonight that I was behind on my posts. I’m still recovering from this weekend. Late last week I got a wild hair and rounded up a post auger for the front of my skid loader, my brothers, and a couple hundred fence posts. We dug the first hole around 7:30 Saturday morning and by Sunday afternoon, all but around a dozen posts were in the ground.

The North Fence Line

We’re putting in a five wire high-tensile fence so we needed to set the posts about 14 feet apart. The system works pretty well as a pasture fence and allows for the wires to be held tight by a spring and ratchet system. If for some reason the wires get stretched and sag – say after a long winter under a snow drift – a few clicks on the ratchet will return the fence to new.

A Portion Of the Pasture Fence

We were able to get in almost all of the perimeter fence posts and the main pasture fence posts. Not a bad weekend. Potato Boy and I still need to set a few of the brace posts and run the wire, but that’s easy compared to digging out a 3 to 4 foot hole just to turn around and fill it back in after setting a post in it. We did run across a bit of trouble though…

A Few Of The Challenging Holes

The bottom half of that photo shows some of the debris left from the farm buildings that were tore down and buried over three or four decades ago. The top of that photo is proof we live on a big rock. We hit about a half dozen holes like this one where we could only go down about 6 to 12 inches before hitting bed rock. We hit well over a dozen more with rock, but were lucky enough to get them deep enough to sneak a post in. I have a plan for getting posts securely set in most of the shallow holes that don’t involve dynamite or a jack hammer – though I can get my hands on the later if the need arises. I even have a plan for setting a post here…

I’ll be sure to share how it turns out.