Fencing the Garden the Manly Way

After tearing out the lower garden fence so we could widen the driveway and ditch it, plus moving the garden up the hill a good bit we kinda realized we are going to have to put the fence back in a some point. Well, we decided not to just put the crappy metal T posts back in, but instead that we wanted a real fence.

If you have ever done a project like this you will realize that the early planning stage is where you can let your dreams soar free, before the second stage of planning, which is where reality usually shows up and slaps you repeatedly in the face. But considering it didn't dawn on us that we might want to replace that fence, until oh, last week, we had no budget, no planning and no reality. What we did have however, was chainsaws.

Manly chainsaws.

And the pickup truck. And trees. So that is what we did. We drove the pickup down to the back, quickly picked out a few trees, and cut them down. We cut the branches off threw them in the back of the pick up and used the bed to measure them to length and boom. Nine fence posts at ten feet tall, leaving a neat six feet that will be above ground. BOO YA. I cannot convey the speed at which we did this, with were like machines, it took less than an hour from start to finish.*

Digging the holes on the other hand, that was a bitch. We used a post hole digger and a pry bar. The the post hole digger was just there mainly to remove the dirt. Taking turns we would ram the pry bar into the hole over and over again to loosen up the rock hard clay at the bottom. The clay hated us. Deeply. Usually once we thought everything was going well we would hit a huge rock. There are only three options when you hit a huge rock.

1. Pry it out if the earth with the pry bar. That is, if you can find an edge. And if the hole is not too deep. And if the rock is not too big.

2. Bash the rock into smaller pieces with the pry bar. This only works on sedimentary rocks. Also it will make your arms hurt. A lot.

3. Give up and move the damn hole somewhere-the-fuck-else.

Needless to say we did a lot of rock bashing. But we didn't have to move any holes so Scott's spacing was not thrown off. We coated the bottoms of the posts below ground level with wood preserver/poison and shoved them in the ground.

We haven't leveled and placed them all yet, we got rained out, and we still have to put in the gate section, but really this project went fairly well. We did not remove the bark on the fence posts, which I am hoping will not come back to haunt us, although I have seen fence posts done both ways. So I dunno. All in all though, this was the fucking manly way to make fence posts that's for goddamned sure.

Nothing like a little working in the garden with chainsaws.

Really, I think that's how all garden work should be done from now on.

* Because we are AWESOME! And coordinated.