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Just a quick update, this weekend was all about fixing the fences.... we can't plant any more plants until the fences are fixed, otherwise the sheep eat everything that we plant... so we only end up with very expensive sheep poo everywhere. 

The difficult part was untangling the fence, wire netting had been used in the past with the standard post and wire fence, so it was a mess, parts fallen over, and over grown with grass etc.

To be honest I didn't really know what I was doing, and trying to put a knot in the fence wire is really difficult... but the end result was OK... the posts are standing and the wire is tight so hopefully that works. I quiet like the inline wire strainers, made the job rather easy.

It's Raining Outside...

We've been waiting for a little rain to fill the pond to ease the liner comfortably into place before we fix it into place for good. Well we didn't get a little rain, we got all the rain we needed and some more!  

Yesterday there was 23mm of rain, and then today 72mm rain, and tomorrow another 60-80mm of rain is predicted! It looks like we going to get a months rain in 3-4 days!

Yesterday I received a phone call from my neighbour to say the wind had been blowing the pond liner into the pond and that it had been bucketing down. He kindly put some timber around the pond to hold the pond liner in place. 

I began to worry a little, as I hadn't yet put an overflow in place, so I took the afternoon off work to go up to the block to check it all out and to make sure the water overflowing wasn't eroding away the pond wall. 

The weather was awful, I think worse than cyclone Lusi that came through earlier in the year. The drive up to the block was a little challenging with a lot of surface flooding... and every time a big rig went past I had to nearly come to a stop due a wall of water being sprayed across to my side of the road, I couldn't see a thing! Also another interesting sight was water going horizontally across the windscreen with the rain!  Even driving at open road speeds normally the rain would travel up the windscreen over the car roof, but as I came up and over some ridges, the wind gusts would blow the car and the rain horizontally across the car windscreen!

On my arrival at the block I was greeted with water everywhere! Which was good in that I have a better idea of where the water runs and flows, so I can make plans to divert it away from the house, but I got soaked running from the car to the house, which is a mere 10 meters!  I didn't think to take a raincoat with me!

I put on my gumboots... and quickly ran around putting more timber on the side of the pond to hold the pond liner in place, protecting it from the howling wind.  I then checked the overflow point, and luckily there was enough pond liner that was covering the outer pond wall, so that was keep the pond wall dry from the water flowing over the top of the pond wall and down the other side of the pond.  

However, another job to add to our "to do" list, when the weather clears up, we will need to make a little creek or stone bed or something to carry the water away from the pond & garden shed, out into the paddock, to try to keep the area dry.  

Fencing... A New Feather In My Hat!

As a boy I remember spending time with Dad, fencing on the sheep & cattle farm that we lived on in the mid 80's in Taranaki. I remember at the time I found it was rather boring and I used to just hang out in the Holden Rodeo ute while Dad was working.  But from that experience I do remember some small details about how Dad built the farm fence. I remember watching Dad using a post hole borer to dig the holes, putting the fence post in and ramming in the dirt to make the post stand tall and strong. I remember helping Dad with that, and dad said all the dirt has to go back into the hole so ram it in good and hard, then running the wires down the fence line.

It's these little things that I remember from my childhood on the farm, and then with the help of Google, I guess this is what gives me the confidence and drives the DIY in me. Dad wasn't educated, and I guess he learned what he knew from his Dad, and working on farms at a young age himself... and he always had that good ole "can do attitude". So if Dad could do it, then I surely can do it, especially with all the information that can be found online today.

But in saying that I wish Dad was still with us today to help and give me some guidance and advice on how to build a fence and other things. 

The previous weekend we had all the timber delivered for the building the fence around the Septic runoff area.  It was quiet a lot of timber, and I was expecting a truck with a crane type setup to deliver the timber, but no, it came in two loads on the back of a trailer, so we had to unload it all by hand. We lost half a day with that.

So this weekend, we've got stuck in and started building our fence. 

So my fence design is based on a post and 2 rail, and then an outrigger type hot wire near the top, and a standard wire along the bottom.   

The hot wire is more to stop the cattle & sheep rubbing on the fence, so they don't damage it.

The posts are 1500mm tall and 100x100mm. We dug the hole about 55cm deep so 1/3rd of the post was in the ground. The posts are set at about 2 meters apart and we used a post hole auger/borer to dig the holes and a post rammer to ram in the dirt.

The two horizontal rails are timber that is 150mm x 50mm and are spaced 30cm apart, and then the hot wire will run between the two of them.  I'm going to invest in solar powered battery pack for the electric fence... I just need to do a little more research on that though.

Then half way from the ground to the bottom of the first rail, we will just run a normal fence wire along the bottom of the fence and use the wire strainers to tighten that wire.

 

Slow progress....

 

By the end of the day, the fence was completed. We just need to run the two wires along the fence, but that should be a quick job for next weekend, then we can start planting and mulching the area inside the fence, the final bit for council compliance.