North line: eleven posts and one bad stretch of wire

Three mornings on the north line, Wednesday through Friday, from about six until ten, while the dew was still holding the ground soft. After ten the ground lets go and a post hole fights you twice as hard. This is the run along the county road, from the corner post by the mailbox to the gate at the east crossing. It is the fence strangers see, so it is the fence I keep up first, whether it needs it or not.

It needed it. Eleven posts came out or went in over the three days. Four were the cedar sets from 2019, the year I switched from treated pine; those are holding better than the feed store said they would, but two of them had worked loose in the frost and leaned road-side. I dug those, packed the holes with a spool of crushed rock from the county load, and reset them plumb. The other seven were old line posts that had finally rotted at the ground, all of them within two feet of where the wire had been stapled tight for decades. Water follows the wire. That is the whole lesson, written down again so I do not forget it a fifth time.

The wire between the corner and the gate is original to my grandfather. Barbed, four strands, and the top two have gone the color of the dirt. It has one bad stretch of about ninety feet where the barbs have rusted smooth and the strands have taken a wave out of a long summer. I tightened it once, standing at the stretcher with the come-along, and the wave came back the next afternoon like it had a memory. So I cut the stretch out and spliced in ninety feet of new wire, sleeve splices at both ends, pulled to the same tension as the rest of the run. The old wire went on the scrap spool. I keep saying I will use it for something and I never do.

Staples: I count them now, because two years ago I had no idea what a run of fence actually consumes. This job took a little over a hundred, and I wrote down the count each morning before I forgot. That number goes in the run-by-run table below, with the posts, because the table is what I actually use next time. When the north line next needs work, I will know in one look what the last pass involved and how long it took.

One neighbor note. The line along the road is my responsibility by county custom, and the corner post is shared with the Kessler place to the west. I set a new witness post behind their corner and told Carl at the mailbox on Thursday. If you share a corner with anybody, tell them the day you touch it. A fence record that only one side keeps is half a record.

Tools that earned their keep this week: the post driver, which I do not love but which beats the dig-and-tamp for rocky ground, the come-along, and the fence pliers that have been re-handled twice. The stretcher is on the bench list with a cracked handle; it worked, but it will get a new one before spring. Everything is back in the machine shed, oiled and hung, which is its own kind of entry and I will not pretend otherwise.

The step list for a job like this, in the order I work it, is written up in the guides under land days.

Entered the same day.