Here we are at another labor day on the farm and another year of projects too big for the weekend.
Project 1 was planned. One of our alpacas constantly got through the strand fencing and went on walk-about. So, I decided to rip out all the old fence and install field fencing. Sounds simple. Yeah 2 solid days and I’m still not finished.
Taking out the old fence was no problem. With the help of a tractor invention removal of the old T-posts was a snap. Pounding in the new T-posts….. PROBLEM! We live in the land of drumlins (aka Glacial Poop). Some areas are soft, loamy and easy to pound posts in. Other areas might be solid gravel or clay.
The top line of posts went in easy, about 15-25 pounds per post. As I turned to go down the hill the soil I was pounding in drastically changed to and evil dry hard clay. My 20 pounds per post was replaced with 60-100 pounds. Yes I count. When you are doing nothing but pounding posts, you can’t help but count especially when you do them in sets of 10. A full day of pounding posts and that’s all I did. My shoulders screamed at me the first night.
Day 2 and up goes the fence. It seems like such an easy and fast task but 8 hours of work and I’m still not done. The fence was rolled out. Secured on one end and a fence stretcher with 2 come-alongs to the other end the idea is to just tighten, stand up the fence and tie her down. The steps are not complicated but the time for each is drawn out. Blah.
The fence is up and 2 t-post clips are secured to each T-post but there’s many many many more t-post clips to do per post.
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Project 2 was NOT planned. The mini job: to dig down and ‘T’ off a water line and put in a new hydrant and power to the new run-in shed for the alpaca boys. Really this wasn’t supposed to be a big task, the shed is within 15 feet of where the utilities are.
Problem, as M. dug down and found the water and power he discovered a mess. The previous owners who ran the utilities 1) didn’t do it to code 2)didn’t put the power in conduit and 3) used indoor plumbing PVC for and outdoor run and it disintegrated when M. found it.
*sigh* so my helper for the fencing now had his own long weekend project digging up the old utilities and having to do them correctly with 2 conduits for power/coax/Ethernet and another line for the water.
Digging was slow as he could only dig down so far with the backhoe and then hand dig the rest so as not to destroy the power cables. It was bad enough we lost water to the one barn losing power would definitely put a damper on things.
Another fun finding while tackling this project is how thoughtless the folks were who installed initially. I think their mentality was something like…. “Oh look, hole. I can throw garbage into that.” Errrr.
Well that project is about 2/3rds the way done. Trench is complete, new conduit is glued together, water pipe in and M. put in proper junction boxes at the house. He also ran pull string in the conduit to make it easier pulling cables through later. All that is left is to put in all the elbows, clean out the bottom of the trench, lay all the conduit and pipe and cover the hole back up.
