08 April 2008

Observations on a Tuesday

I spent the day today working with Gentleman Farmer. For several years now, he has wanted to redo a fence line that runs by his house, and today was the day to begin tackling it.

The people who lived there before GF and his family had the idea of raising beefalo (a cross between a cow and a buffalo) to sell to restaurants. So, they put up a four stand barb wire fence, with the lowest strand about 5" off the ground (apparently the beefalo were tiny?), and the top strand at about 3'.

The beefalo jumped this fence (they may have been tiny, but they could jump!), so they added chicken wire on the pasture side, to make it 4' tall. Then for some reason they added chicken wire to the outside of the fence as well (makes no sense to have two layers of chicken wire, but there it was.

Apparently none of the chicken wire did any good, because they then strung two lines of electric fence on the inside (which has long been disconnected). So the fence has four layers of wire to it.

[As an aside, GF's neighbor, who was born and raised next door, said that the beefalo continued to 'escape' and would have to be chased down and herded back regularly]

Oh, and then they planted English Ivy along the fence line, which has had at least ten years to grow and intertwine through all that fencing.

Do you have any idea how much of a pain in the ass it was to tear all that down? If you don't, picture the distance from your shoulder to the tip of your hand. That's easy. Now, picture the distance from the Earth to the Sun. About that hard.

Digging the postholes for the new split rail fence, which is absolutely not fun, was a comparative breeze.

Bob be a sore puppy.

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