On gorgeous days like today it reminds us how fast weather can change in Wisconsin. It got us to thinking about this time last year and what we were doing. I was around 7 months pregnant with Crosby and crazily trying to get done building things on the farm with our due date fast approaching. That’s when the crazy pregnant woman with the list came in. There even was a hand drawn out calendar and lists of everything we were going to get done in March and April. But the funny part about looking back on this is that last March was pretty warm and then we planned out every weekend because we thought it was going to be even warmer in April. Not the case! The weekend we planned to start digging post holes for the fences it was a little chilly in the morning but as the day went on it started raining then sleeting then snowing. Jesse and My dad were out there for almost 9 hours digging what turned out to be 100 post holes in the freezing cold! We got all the fences built for the goat and the pigs by the end of April and we even finished the shelter for the pigs too before Crosby was born.
If you were wondering how to put in this type of fence here is some information for you.
Things you’ll need: Everything we needed we bought from Fleet farm. There are different size circle posts and different size/gauge/height field fence as well.
- posts
- field fence
- fence tie twister tool
- sledge hammer/baseball batt
- gloves
- post level (we bought an actual post level which works way better than when we used to “eyeball” it or try to improvise with a straight level)
- Fence Stretcher
The day before we were going to start digging we planned out our fence. That is the most important part of any DIY project. You can use any type of marker/stick/flag to mark out the first 4 corners of your fence. Once you have the 4 corners then we took long pieces of rope and tied them to one side. This way we could put markers in a straight line down the fence wherever we wanted more posts to be set. I think we went about 8 feet apart for our posts… overkill? Maybe, but we wanted this to be strong! We rented a post hole digger from a rental shop near us. We wanted a heavy duty one since we knew we were going to be digging a ton of holes and it was only April so we didn’t know how far down the ground was still frozen. We’re really glad we rented a powerful post hole digger because on some of our holes after we got down 2 feet it was really rocky. Then was the crazy day of digging holes! Every project we do seems to start out with us thinking it’s going to be done in an hour and then at the end of the day it’s like… wow, that took a lot longer than we thought. We took our posts and put them in each of the holes then we used the sledgehammer to help drive it further down. The baseball bat came in handy when we were trying to shove dirt back around the post into the hole to keep it packed tight in there. We then took the field fence and used pieces of wire and tied the fence to itself on the first post. We had our ATV handy so we put the ATV down on the end of the first straight side and attached the fence stretcher to the fence then the metal chain to the ATV and then used the ATV to carefully pull the first side taught. We repeated for each side of the fence. There are a bunch of different Youtube videos out there that show you… we watched a ton and compiled our best plan. The fence metal twister tool was only like a dollar but it really helped us be able to cleanly twist that metal without hurting your fingers or making it look really bad.
Once again, feel free to email or message us if you have a fence or DIY question that you want help in figuring out.
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Tags: 3 little pigs,
black and white pigs,
diy farm fence,
duroc pigs,
fence for goats,
fence for pigs,
fence posts,
fence stretcher,
Pig fence,
pig shelter,
pigs,
post hole digger
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The story of a growing family experiencing farm life, design and everyday chaos..
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