Fencing and News

Major stress relief this week, it looks like we’ve just sold our existing house. Now only waiting for finance approval for the buyers. Funny how things work out. We redesigned the new house and cut out some of the cool stuff because covid meant we couldn’t sell our current house and even if we could  its value was estimated to have dropped 10% or more.

To be honest house prices in our area at the moment are ridiculous and we both feel  very uncomfortable about participating in an unaffordable market. The only way we can rationalise it is our small farm project will, all things going to plan, generate a great deal of community good to offset the negative. Neither of us are sure this calculus is valid, but we can’t see any alternatives.

In the end the house sold in less than a week and for about 10% MORE than we had budgeted for! So we could have left everything in and it would have all worked out – c’est la vie!

Apart from a recent 5 day lock down this is the reason we haven’t had much time to be at the farm recently. However, our new house is now done to lock up and waiting for the builders to release it to us.

So the last couple of days have been enjoyable, getting to work on the farm. Today’s action was building the front fence. So I thought it might be a good time to introduce a couple of fencing ideas and talk about tools.

Our front fence will be mostly star pickets (or Y posts in the US) because they are easy to install and relatively inexpensive. They have some issues though. When you strain a wire running through a star picket, if that picket is lower than its neighbours (like in a gully) then it will just pull out of the ground as you strain up the wire. So how to avoid? Continue reading “Fencing and News”