FENCING SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS 🤺🔨

"We realized that pounding a wood post with a sledge hammer soon resulted in the mushroomed top of that wood post..."

Do you have any experience fencing?  Not Olympic fencing.  Shovel fencing.  Post pounding fencing.  The kind of fencing that takes sweat.  We just got two calves and they’ve been restrained from wandering with a halter and rope on each one.  Walking a calf isn’t quite like walking a puppy.  It’s more like walking a cow.  And cows are much stronger than 8 or 9 or 10-year-olds that try to take them for walks or pull them back to the barn. That’s not a viable long-term cattle solution so fencing must be put up!  Luckily, we found a couple dozen wood fenceposts in one of our old sheds so we could get the job started without spending a nickel.

The first thing we had to do was string up some string so our fence would resemble something of a straight line.  Do we have hundreds of yards of fencing string?  No!  Do we have some stretchy rope the kids use to make forts around the yard?  Yes!  We actually had a piece that was 100 feet long.  Therefore, our first section of fence would be 100 feet long.  Excellent. 

Do we have a tractor-mounted post pounder?  No!  Do we have a couple shovels and a sledge hammer?  Yes!  My 17 and18-year-old daughters, Annabelle and Florence, were assigned the job of pre-digging some holes for our posts.  Believe me, they were quite enthusiastic.  They started off down the line and I followed up behind to dig a bit deeper and get the wood posts set.  Sterling, age 12, was the lucky lad tasked with holding the splinter-filled post level while I used the sledge hammer and my elderly muscles to pound it in a few inches deeper.  It wasn’t very long before he asked if he could go get some gloves. 

We soon realized that pounding the top of a wood post with a sledge hammer soon resulted in the mushroomed top of that wood post.  We needed to protect the top of the post, but how?  Being both smart and clever, I suggested getting an empty paint can out of the shop with a steel bottom to shield the top of the post.  We simply placed the can upside down on the top of the post and, “Voila!”, post protection!  It wasn’t long before the can was smashed to smithereens.  So then we needed a small hammer to pound out the smashed can.  I brought a regular hammer out to the yard with us because you always need a hammer for a job.  Now all I needed to do was find the hammer.  “Does anyone know where the hammer is?  Where’s the hammer?”  I had some other helpers on the job with ages between 3 and 8.  Those types of ages like to play with hammers.  The hammer was gone somewhere in 8 acres of grass.  We would just continue to use the smashed can to the best of our ability.

We did get about six posts in.  We all went inside for some cool drinks and surveyed our work from the comfort of an air-conditioned environment.  Maybe next time we’ll get another six in.  The fence will eventually be built.  Memories will be made.  Tools will be lost.  Time flies!  Make every moment count!  Even the looking-for-hammer moments.