It has been a while since I have writing an article for my web site as I have been putting a lot of my energy and time into putting up fencing on our land. What started many years ago as four pet sheep have now turned into 120 sheep?
The 4 pet calves are now 14 cattle and there are also a number of pigs running around, so for this reason I have had to put up some new fencing. What was about 80 acres that was very hard to muster as the sheep would just run from one gully to another and back again has now been split up into four different blocks.
So far I have put in 1.1 km of fencing on some reasonable steep ground. Any person who has done high country fencing before will know how physically hard it is. So I don’t need to worry about a gym membership as this fencing is a very good work out. I had one young fellow Ethan Wylie in helping me for two days.
He did teach me a few tricks on how to tie wires off which has helped. Once the strainer posts were in the ground I would pull a wire out between them to give me a straight line then because the fences are on a hill I would have to put a couple of warraths in to get my line over the brow of the hills right. Hitting warraths into rock hard ground is great for creating blisters on soft hands.
One of the downsides of this is that my wife does not like me touching her with my hands now as they are like leather. Working with the wire is also hard on the hands, one day I was on the ridge opposite the house a piece of wire ripped a good sized chunk of skin off the end of my index finger. This bleed like buggery and when I looked over at the house I thought to myself it will take me over ten minutes to walk each way back though the gully plus the time to clean it up so I just carried on.
At the end of the day when I was back at the house I had to chop a good size flap of skin off. The biggest downside of this one is I could not play the guitar for a while until it started to heal up a bit, but it did not stop me from fencing. The last part of the fence that I am working on is the hardest piece. Up behind the dog kennels I have had a bulldozer put a fence line in and at the time when he came down one face I did not think a bulldozer could stay upright it was that steep. When he hit the bottom he got temporarily stuck as he was wedged in the gully.
It was impressive to see how he wriggled his bulldozer around and dropped down six foot banks to get back onto a track to drive back up again. At the bottom of this gully I am having to dig with a crow bar through the rock so that I can concrete in two posts with feet on them so that they will not come out when the fence wires are strained up. Between these two posts I will put boards across to hold the posts in strong leaving enough room underneath the boards for the creek to run though.