This is planting time--one of the busiest times on the farm. We have a small window of time when the crops must go in, and the weather's just right... except it isn't. We've been blessed with an abundance of rain, which was needed. But maybe not this much, not just now. Farmers in our area are a bit tense right now--many of them have crops in, but the cold and wet weather has the corn looking a bit sickly. Those of us who don't have our corn in are tense, too. We joke that if we hear one more meteorologist say, "Well, the farmers must be happy about all this rain," we'll go postal.
But in every cloud there is a silver lining. We've been needing more fencing done for 2-3 years now, and with the addition of the beef cows, that need is more urgent than ever. A couple of days ago, with permission, we cut down a few sassafras trees from a neighbor's woods. The sassafras resists decay somewhat more than other trees, and is approved for organic use, unlike the treated fence posts we used to use.
Then we borrowed a friend's post hole digger and went to work.
The post hole digger attaches to the tractor and is a marvelous invention. See how west the soil is? No good for planting right now.
In addition to power tools, we had quite a few people helping. Here's one of our helpers delivering sassafras poles.
It's important to bury the poles deeply. These poles will have a lot of tension placed on them from our 6-strand wire fence.
The soil that was dug out is used to pack tightly around the posts.
The posts are all set now, and everyone was very tired. More about fence building later.
Fence building truly is a lost art/skill! Thanks for showing this part of farm life and good luck on the building and planting.
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