The fencing project is taking some time. Between rainy days and the limitations of having small cars, we have been making slow progress on our garden area. I am pleased to report that the posts are in! We finally got a beautiful weekend and had the opportunity to work until we couldn't go on anymore.
I let Mike take the reigns on this project and he spent several hours coming up with a design and came up with a list of materials needed and a cost estimate. Building a fence on a budget is not easy. Even chain link fences are several hundred at minimum! If you are following from my
initial post about our garden plans, our garden area is about 420 square feet. Not super large. That's slightly larger than our family room. So I wasn't expecting it to cost $500 to fence it in. That was Mike's initial estimate of the lattice-based fence. I eventually made peace with the loss of the money and realized that we needed a fence as an additional barrier for our chickens.
Over the course of a couple of weeks, Mike managed to buy the posts and start getting them in the ground. I started helping him around the third post. Most of the posts are measured about eight feet apart.
The first step is to dig a hole. Bonus points for achieving a goofy look on your face like my husband's.
Once dug, quickly measure to ensure that the hole is a foot deep.
Then fill the bottom with a couple inches of pea gravel for drainage.
Tap down the gravel to make sure the ground is even before the post went in.
Now it is time to finally put in the post. I held up the post while Mike poured in the Quikrete. It was really dusty and we probably should have worn masks.
Then add water to "mix" the cement. The bag says it takes somewhere around 45 minutes to set, but it really takes a day or two to become really solid.
It took us a couple of weeks to get all of the posts in. I am so happy to say we are finished with this portion of the garden. 14 posts, 9 bags of Quikrete, and 5 bags of pea gravel later, we are ready to assemble the fence.
I know some of you reading this may be thinking that we didn't dig these holes deep enough. Typically you want to dig below the frost line to avoid the post shifting. Each city generally has a guideline on how deep you will need to dig. Due to our hill (bluff) being made of semi-solid rock once we dug about a foot deep, going any deeper than that wasn't realistic. In one of the corners I hit rock at only about six inches deep so we ended up having to get a sledge hammer and cement chisel to break far enough down. This fence isn't meant to last a lifetime. Just something simple to keep the rabbits out and deter the raccoons.
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