Tag Archives: fencing

A Farm Toolbox: T-Post Jack

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Fencing, that constant companion of all that we do on our farm, is made easier with the metal T-post—which itself is made easier to put in with a T-post driver and easier still to remove with the post driver’s first cousin, the T-post jack.

All fences that go up will someday come down. After some years of using brute strength to pull old T-posts from the ground, often finding them bent and unusable, I spotted this beauty at a local farm supply store.

Proper jack position for removing a t-post.

Proper jack position for removing a t-post.

Brilliant: a jack, one of the oldest of man’s tools, designed to tackle one of his oldest chores, fence building. Among the simplest mechanical devices invented for applying force to an object, the T-post jack makes lifting and removing T-posts remarkably effective and easy. A simple downward popping action on the handle and posts emerge from the ground a few inches at a time, straight and reusable.

And my back, likewise, remains straight and reusable.

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Reading this weekend: Xenophon’s March: into the lair of the Persian lion by John Prevas. Terrific story that makes me feel shame about complaining about the daily walk to the mailbox.

A Nice Fall Day

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I awoke yesterday morning at my usual time. Everyone has his internal clock, and an hour before sunrise mine goes off. Always has. Checking the temperature, I saw that we had dropped for the first time this fall into the low 40s. The wind was up, blowing the wind chimes as I made coffee. The cold front continued to move into our valley and blew hard all day.

I compulsively checked email and wrote a few letters before waking Cindy up. A lot of small to medium tasks on our to-do list: working on hog fencing, washing clothes, baking bread, checking the bees, doing the usual chores, putting up siding on the new hay barn, laying down fresh bedding for the sheep.Early October on the farm 021

By 8:30 Caleb had shown up from his home down the hill. He and I gathered our tools and headed to the hog paddock. The paddock is a wooded area of about two acres. It runs at a 25 degree slope from east to west. Over the years, the hogs have rooted away the eastern edge along the fenceline, leaving gaps in some places of as much as 12 inches at the bottom of the fence. Our task was to lower each hog panel to ground level and reset the electric wire to about six inches above the ground. It was a straightforward task that Caleb and I were able to complete by noon.

The whole time we were working, with the cold wind seeping into the valley, I kept thinking about catfish. As a kid I lived for those moments to run my trotlines, getting up every two hours throughout the night, checking the lines, removing the fish and rebaiting hooks. ‘Long about sunup, I’d spend an hour or two cleaning the catfish hung on the old oak tree in the backyard. Having dumped the heads and entrails back into the pond, I’d head into the house to breakfast. With those thoughts in mind, I headed in for lunch of a couple of lamb chops and winter squash soup from the night before, leaving Caleb to put away the tools.

Cindy, meanwhile, had been busy through the morning with washing and hanging clothes out to dry, baking bread, prepping winter squash for freezing and checking the bees. After lunch, our friend Susan showed up bearing homemade preserves: pear butter, fresh cider vinegar and candied jalapenos. She was also picking up a quarter-beef. After she departed, I went for a nice walk and smoked a cigar. A cool fall afternoon is the perfect time for a smoke and reflective walk. An hour later, I was back at the house, where Cindy and I enjoyed coffee and fresh baked bread with some of Susan’s pear butter.

After coffee, we headed back outside and spent a couple of hours putting siding up on the barn, milled from our new sawmill. Cindy has been doing most of the work putting it up, but now I have done my bit and can rightfully claim that it was a mutual project. Right?

Back inside for a rare co-produced dinner, a rooster simmered with herbs and onions from the garden for a few hours by me, then further seasoned by Cindy and the stock topped with her homemade dumplings. Chicken and dumplings as the mercury dips to 35 degrees—now that is the way to complete a great day.

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Reading this weekend: Galahad at Blandings by P.G. Wodehouse. Hard to be disgruntled with the state of the world when Wodehouse is at hand.

A Farm Toolbox: A Spinning Jenny

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The spinning jenny is not a perfect tool. Nor is it a beautiful tool. But it is a tool that is a delight to use if you value your back as much as I value mine.

Our spinning jenny is admired by one and all.

Our spinning jenny is admired by one and all.

 

The problem with starting farming at age 37 (15 years ago now) is that all of the common sense things you’ve learned to date are no longer useful. Things like the best walking route through the neighborhood to get to Bill Meyer stadium for an evening baseball game, or the best time to get a seat at Harold’s Kosher Deli on Saturday morning…. All were now useless. All new knowledge was hard won.

So for the first couple of years farming we built fencing the old-fashioned way: with sheer brute strength, mostly mine. I’d pick up a 50-pound-plus roll of barbed wire to chest height and begin walking backwards. Hundreds of yards of the stuff, up and down hills, through woods and across sunny pastures, lift, step back and back, until the strand was stretched.

One day, talking with an old farmer, I pondered that it sure would be nice if there were some tool you could use to unspool barbed wire. He suggested I purchase a spinning jenny. I did that afternoon, for about $10. And that, as they say, has made all the difference.

Fencing is still hard work. But a spinning jenny makes the job easier, and that is what a good tool is supposed to do.

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Reading this weekend: Conspirata by Robert Harris. The second of his historical novels on the life of Cicero. 

A Farm Toolbox: the T-Post Driver

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When reaching for the t-post driver one knows they are in for a workout. A two-foot cast iron pipe, capped on one end, with handles on each side, it is used to drive a t-post into the ground. It weighs 25 pounds. A t-post is a steel post, typically six feet in length, used to support fencing such as barbed wire. Slip the driver over the post, level the post in all directions, then raise the driver up and bring it down with force. Repeat until the post is buried a foot in the ground.

T-post driver 2 001Its design is simple, primitive and highly effective. Brute energy directed on a single point accomplishes the task in short order. We have set over a thousand t-posts with the driver on our farm. Unlike its cousin the rock-bar, the driver has no other function. It hangs in the barn on its lonely hook for months at a time.

Many have been the day when, with the driver in one hand and several t-posts in the other, I’ve hiked a half-mile to a back fence. There to retire an old wooden post or two that had finally rotted away into mush. Or, other days, setting a new row of fifty posts, Cindy and I take turn pounding them into the dirt.

The act itself, the methodical raising and hammering down, is thoroughly satisfying. A release of accumulated aggressions into a constructive channel; where the ache between your shoulders the following day is an echo of work well done. And a sturdy fence, well made, is a reminder of the value in physical toil.

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Reading this weekend: In Ruins by Christopher Woodward. A hard to characterize book, it is part travel writing and part meditation on the attraction of ruins. Think Ozymandias meets Haunts of the Black Masseur and you might be close.

Two Dog Tales

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It’s how you say it, not what you say

Dogs listen more to your tone than to your words. It was in the low thirties and Caleb and I had been clearing a couple hundred yards of trees and brush with the chainsaw. Hard work on a steep slope, made more fatiguing by the cold. We had been at it for several hours while Becky and Katie, our two English Shepherds stayed close by my side.

Further down that hill slope, through a screen of woods was Caleb’s house. They have a collection of what I refer to as “Yappers,” dogs of no determinable breed but all weighing fewer than twenty pounds. A Napoleon complex acted out on a canine stage, these yappers provided a background of steady barking and growling to the crisp winter morning. The house they were protecting was a good fifty yards away from where we worked.  But it was clear they saw us as a threat.

My dogs ignored them other than to give the occasional irritated glance. As we neared completion of the project, Katie (daughter of Becky) ran down the slope towards the fence line. Fearing a rumble and its aftermath I barked a sharp guttural, “KATIE!” To your average kid it would be interpreted that your dad was pissed and you better stop what you are doing. And Katie did stop. Becky on the other hand heard the tone and translated it into “GET-EM!”  She exploded into action and covered the fifty yards before the “yappers” could bark an “Oh, shit.”

She rolled through and over them in a fight I could only glimpse through the screen of woods. Caleb and I are both yelling for her to return. Caleb’s stepdad is out on the porch yelling. And it occurs to me, finally, that to Becky it probably sounds like encouragement. With us as stand-ins for Roman citizens at the Coliseum, screaming for more blood, Becky was determined to entertain. She came back up the slope looking a bit smug from the fight. I yelled at her for good measure and we finished our work.

Old Meanness

Tip, our aged stockdog, was oblivious to the fight. Stone deaf and arthritic she misses all the excitement. But she still has a growl that chills the blood of certain men in the neighborhood. Is it wrong to chuckle at the memory of her pinning Caleb’s brother-in-law on the roof of his truck? I heard a plaintive call one day and went out to find Jay on the truck roof. Tip was using her growl and her stockdog eye to keep the interloper penned until she could consult with me.

A few months ago Cindy and I walked over the hill to visit with our neighbor at his barn. Tip insists on accompanying me anywhere on the farm. But with her arthritis it takes her three times as long to make the journey. We had been talking with Lowell for about fifteen minutes when Tip finally arrived. Lowell, who likes Tip and isn’t buffaloed by her growl, said affectionately, “well, here comes Old Meanness.”

We like that moniker.

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Reading this weekend: Dirt: the erosion of civilizations by David R. Montgomery. It is a fascinating history of the geologic record and role that the loss of soil has played in the decline of civilizations, a message we would do well to take seriously.