We just went out today and drove 12 big fence posts before lunch. We marked the locations for these big posts with a few little step-in posts last fall when the marking crew came out just before the ground froze. Now we can drive the big guys in without worrying if we’re gonna hit any buried utility lines.
The frost has left the ground (at least the top 3 feet) and the previous week of rain softened things up nicely. It’s time to get the overly-large “front yard” fenced in so the cows can do all the mowing. Less gasoline and more beef, that’s the plan.
While we were out driving posts I saw the first tree swallow of the year. Luckily it was checking out one of the 4 new Swallow Houses that I just put up along the road. Our neighbors pond just across the road is always a huge draw for the swallows, so they ought to like having some convenient housing nearby.
I have come up with a better way of mounting the bird houses to our fence posts. I fasten the bird house to a 2′ length of 2×2 and then use a small wedge (2×2 ripped diagonally, about 8″ long) to wedge it in the top of the fence post. So far this seems to be much more secure than the old method of using a single larger wedge.
The cows and pigs are all chomping at the proverbial bit to get out onto pasture. They’re confined to a few “sacrifice paddocks” until the grass gets high enough to let them out to graze.
You begin to see where the term sacrifice paddock comes from. Bored cows and pigs can wreck havoc on newly-thawed ground. The trick is to keep the havoc contained to a few small areas so the rest of the grass gets a good head-start.
A few more weeks of hay, and then they get the good stuff.
