Fence Finished! Yay!

Today, after getting home from another day in the office, I spent some time on the fence. Yesterday, I took all of the clips off the mesh so that I could tension the 3rd wire. That left me with a clear run at the job today. There were loads and loads of clips on the 3rd line and they were very badly rusted. I got blisters on my hand from the pliers and the repetitive twisting of the clips left my wrists a bit sore.

Today, I pulled the 3rd line through and tensioned it. The 3rd line is the line that holds the top of the dog mesh, so it didn’t need to be as tight as the top two lines.

The line was tensioned and then I went along the fence and put new clips on the mesh to hold it up. There were a couple of holes in the mesh that I had to knit back together.

The mesh didn’t reach all the way along the fence. The mesh stopped about 8m from the gate end of the fence and it is a Frankenstein combination of dog mesh, welded 4x4” mesh and chicken wire. The 4x4” mesh is OK, but the chicken wire is draped over a 3 rail timber fence (the timber fence was also falling down) and only covers the bottom half of the fence.

I put up some new chicken wire that covers the timber fence from top to bottom and did some repair work on the timber work as well. Finally, I had to knit the end of the chicken wire to the 4x4” mesh.

The fence is now sheep repellent … the sheep should be able to roam around the front paddock without fear of them escaping. We enlisted our lovely little daughter to get some sheep peanuts and try to entice the sheep into their newly opened paddock. Initially, the sheep were very … sheepish. After they did a circuit of the paddock the sheep seemed to get very excited (or at least excited in sheep terms). The sheep wandered around the paddock and ate lots of seed heads. After the sheep had their fill of excitement, they headed back to their normal daytime paddock.

All in all, the fence seems to be doing the job and I am very happy to have finally finished the thing. HA HA FENCE, I WIN!

Fishing Adventure

We went down the east coast to Opossum Bay to do a spot of fishing. This is a really lovely spot, just over from the jetty.

The tide was out when we got there, so we had a poke around the rock pools … well my darling wife and little daughter did, I risked the low tide with my fishing rod anyway.

After about an hour, the water had come up a little and we decamped to the jetty and sat there for another couple of hours just pleasantly soaking and losing bait. I caught a flathead, but it was too small to keep.

After that, we came home and it was time to feed the goats.

We let the chickens out very early today … so they had decided to hide their eggs rather than lay in the coop (evil chickens!).

Fence … when will you end?

This morning I got up and got on to fixing the fence. I needed to replace the temporary barrier by re-joining the two ends of the fence that runs east-west. The wire was in a pretty horrible state and it was too fragile to twist very much.

I reattached the tensioning wires and then attached the mesh using netting clips.

The mesh overlapped a bit, so there is at least some support for the mesh, the staples will be holding the fence to the hurdle.

I stuffed up a little bit … the gate no longer opens past the hurdle. Never mind … the slope always made this a difficult way to open the gate anyway.

The top line was then tensioned using the ratchet and then I walked down the fence to check the tension and to make sure there were no kinks preventing the line being tensioned. Halfway down the fence I noticed that a previous repair job on the fence had twisted the top and midline wires around each other, on the other side of the twist, the top-line was very loose … hrumph. I will need to cut the mid-wire and untwist it from the top, then I will put a tensioner on the other end of the fence as well.

Now that I have done what I can today … it’s time to go fishing!

More Fence work

The long awaited replacement of the fencepost that is the corner post for three paddocks is upon us.

This post joins three paddocks, and I need to re-tension all of them. The fence that needs the most work is the fence that runs off in the upper left of the above picture. This fence separates our lower paddock from our neighbour’s property and it is the one that has taken the biggest beating from fallen trees and branches. Also, I want to let the sheep graze in this paddock.

Taking the wire off the post wasn’t too hard, the staples came out fairly easily. The main problem with unwiring this post was that the ends of each of the fences wrapped around the post and each other … making it a bit of a puzzle to unwrap it.

When the staples were out and the wire unwrapped, I folded the wire back so that it held itself out of the way. Then, out came the post.

This post wasn’t rotted too badly, but it did have a terrible lean … so, out it comes and onto the bonfire for later.

I attached the fence from the sheep paddock to the end of the gate using a bit of twisted wire, so that I can leave the fence as it is until the fence posts have set in the ground without having to worry about the sheep getting out. It isn’t a long term solution … so I’ll need to rewire the fence as soon as I can.

Next, I dug out the holes for the posts (I had to move one hole because the cross piece on the new hurdle is shorter than the original one was), set the posts into the ground, backfilled and packed the soil down as hard as I could. I wanted the posts to be able to stand upright without support so that they didn’t need extra posts while the concrete set. After digging the holes out, I had a bit of a sit down in the shade.

When I had rested enough, I got the concrete mixed and poured into the holes. My darling wife had to go off to the hardware store to get some more concrete (I didn’t check how much I had before I started).

The concrete was then smoothed out and cleaned up. Next, it’s back to the house to clean the buckets and tools and I get to sit and relax for a while.

Gratuitous Goat Shots

Here are some pictures of our goats.

Minnie, Daphne and Darius …

and Holly

Here’s a shot of Minnie standing on top of the cable wheel. They like playing on their cable wheel, they play “King of the Hill” on their toy.

Standing on the cable wheel … having a yodel!

I have covered the holes in the cable wheel with some ply-wood so that feet don’t accidentally get stuck and goat’s end up with broken legs. A friend of mine had a goat who broke her leg like that.

More fence repairs

The old fence needs some repairing. The mesh has collapsed over time by being pushed over by the dirt and rocks eroded from our neighbours driveway as well as just being old.

The top to strands have been restrecthed, but the bottom strand and the mesh are looking pretty poor. The sheep will just walk straight through the gap. They like just walking through the fence.

What I’m doing to repair the fence is taking a short strand of fencing wire and attaching the mesh to the strands above it. Basically, I’m knitting new mesh wire into the fence so that it becomes a mesh fence all the way to the top.

I start by wrapping the wire around the top joint of the mesh, the wire goes around both sides of the joint so that it doesn’t just get pushed along the mesh. I pull the mesh up as high as I can pull it and then wrap the wire around the middle strand. The wire goes up and over, then around in a figure of 8, again, so that the wire doesn’t move left and right on the middle strand. Finally, the wire goes up and over the top strand, around in a figure of 8 and then pulled around the main wire for more support.

Then repeat …

I’ve fixed most of the fence so far … I still have a couple of meters (about 8) left to do, but I ran out of fence wire. I’m going to have to buy some more fencing wire. D’oh!

New High Pressure Water Cleaner has arrived …

I bought a high pressure water cleaner off e-bay. It’s a Memphis Aqua 3500PSI cleaner with a bunch of attachments. I need to clean out my chicken coop on a regular basis as my white leghorn chickens are suspected to have Marek’s disease (Turkey Herpes HTV). When the white leghorns die off, I will bring the Isa Browns into the coop. Before I do that, I have to eradicate the Marek’s disease pathogens from the coop.

I’ve read a few articles on the interweb about how to disinfect the coop for Marek’s and it appears that the process is going to involve some pretty nasty disinfectants. The Department of Primary Industry, Parks, Water and the Environment (DPIPWE) have the following article on disinfecting the chickens living area – Marek’s Disease, although they don’t mention a type of disinfectant to use. I have emailed the distributor of the HWPC to find out what chemicals I can use in the device … so I’ll see what I can do.

I’ve spoken with our vet (Montrose Veterinary Surgery) about disinfectants that are effective against the Marek’s disease pathogen, and her advice is to use Hospital grade bleach. My lovely wife and I decided that we’d like to find out, once and for all, if our chickens do indeed have Marek’s or if we have misdiagnosed the problem (I’m not a vet, so that is certainly possible). So we will need to take some of our chickens to the surgery for blood tests. I’m not keen on a post-mortem analysis, as that would be throwing the baby out with the bath-water.

If it is indeed Marek’s, then I will do a dry clean of the coop. That is, removing all of the chickens bedding manually, with pitchfork, spade and broom. Then I will use the HWPC with detergent to clean the coop out as thoroughly as possible, and then spray hospital grade bleach over the entire coop to kill the pathogens. All of this will be while the chickens are out free-ranging for the day. When the coop is clean and the bleach has dried, I will lay down new straw and wood shavings in the roost.

I will also need to have my other flock tested for Marek’s. If they both have it, then I’ll move all of the chickens in together, if not, I will keep them separated and repeat the disinfection clean-up on a regular basis (probably monthly).

Sickle repair

A while back, I bought a broken sickle from the tip shop. The blade was in good condition and not twisted. The reason that the sickle was at the tip shop was that the tang was broken and the handle was long gone.

When I got it home, I beat out a new tang for the blade and welded it on, then ground it down (roughly) … and then it stayed in my shed for a while.

On the weekend, I did some mowing with my ride-on Husqvarna. I just went around the paddock fence line so that I would have an easier time of putting up the new fence. I also cut around the chicken coop so that the chooks could scratch up some insects.

As the goats hadn’t been out, I decided that I’d cut the grass closer to the coop than the mower could get … and that I’d use the sickle.

I honed the blade to a nice sharp edge and then went to town on the long grass, cutting it and dropping the cuttings into the wheelbarrow. Of course, not having a handle on the sickle gave my hand a pretty hard time … and before long, my hand was bleeding from the rough parts of the tang gouging my finger.

Enough was enough! Last night I took the sickle back to the shed and cut a new 2 piece handle from some spare cedar and then I cut some 5/32 brass rod to make some rivets. I cut the cedar on the band saw and then I drilled three holes in the tang and matched the tang holes with holes in the handle blanks. I gave the handle a rough shaping with my bastard rasp and then set the rivets (that just means I hammered the rivets until they were flush and then used the centre punch to finish them off, rivets in handles don’t need to be mushroomed, just thickened a little). Then I rasped at the handle some more until I got the shape that I wanted, then it was onto the sandpaper.

The place that my finger was taking the most damage from was the 90^o angle between the blade and the tang, so the new handle is cut to ease this into a soft radius. I also shaped the handle so that it fit the curve of my hand better. Later on, I’ll rub some linseed oil into the wood … but that isn’t all that necessary.

Gone Fishing …

Today, we planned to go fishing. A nice break, just fishing … how relaxing.

The chick’s water feeder broke this morning, so I had to get a new one today so that the chick’s had a water supply. While we were at the shop buying the water feeder, we saw a nice feeder that was much larger than their current one … so we got a new feeder as well. The old feeder held about 0.5 kilo of feed and I was filling it every morning and night, the new one holds 1.5 kilos of feed, so now I will only need to feed the chicks once a day, of course I will still be checking the chicks before and after work every day.

We went fishing at about 1pm and went to McGee’s bridge. This is a bridge over a large seawater bay in southern Tasmania. Mostly … we catch flathead.

My lovely wife was the first of us to hook a fish, she caught a mullet. It was a little bit small, so back in it went.

We caught some flathead a cocky (a young salmon) and my daughter thinks that she caught a bream … but I’m not so sure. It came off the hook just as she was landing it.

We had a lovely time on the bridge having a nice fishing adventure. Next weekend, we hope to go a little bit further down south and do some rock fishing. There was a nice spot that we found that has some nice rock ledges and rock-pools. If we get bored fishing, we can poke around in the rock-pools.

Best laid plans and all that …

Today I was planning on starting on the next fence hurdle. Before I did that, I wanted to strain up the previous fence. When I started to put pressure on the fence wire, the middle fence post fell over. The post was completely rotten and it had a huge population of ants in it. Oh well. The post was about 8” diameter, but under the ground, the post was about 1” in diameter. There is a lot of water under the ground here, so it isn’t going to have a good life.

I pulled the post out and it’s diagonal support leaving me with a mucky muddy hole. I dug the hole out a bit and put in a new post and packed some rocks around it, then back filled. I put in a pair of temporary supports and nailed them to the post and then poured in some concrete. Now all I have to do is to wait for it to cure.

Right, it’s off fishing tomorrow!

I need to buy a few more bags of cement and I’ll see about that other fence post.

This weekend’s target

This weekend, I’m hoping to start work on the next fence hurdle. This one isn’t in as bad a state as the last one, but it is pretty bad. The fence post is part of the gate to the bottom paddock and the gate doesn’t close properly any more. Fixing this hurdle will allow me to straighten the bottom fence as well as fixing the gate, so it will be a good job to get it done.

The cross bar from the hurdle is long gone. I used a piece of steel pipe to prop the fence post up, but it still isn’t straight enough to allow the gate to close properly.

I’ll need to pare the old wire away from the post so that I can lever the old post out. I can’t afford to take too long with this, or leave the fence down at all, my sheep are in one of the paddocks that this post is the corner of (in fact, the paddock that I am standing in to take the photo).

After getting the post out, I will put in a star-post to hold the fence up while I get the new fence post set. It is going to be difficult to set the hole because of the fences that will still be attached in-situ. I can’t use the petrol auger, so I’ll have to resort to using the manual auger and a spade.

When the hole is in, I will put the fence post in and concrete it. Then I will need to wait for the concrete to cure before I can reattach the fence.

While I am waiting for the concrete to cure, I’ll take the second post out and replace it and get the cross bar put in. The second post will be concreted in too, added strength is always good. The main reason that the fence has come down over time is that the next door neighbours property has lots of trees, and occasionally, they come down on the fence and it damages the wire. I can expect that the wire will be damaged again in the future, but that’s just the way it goes.

Brighton Show

Today, my wife, my youngest daughter, her friend and I all went along to the Brighton show today. This is another fixture in the show calendar of Tasmanian agricultural shows. Brighton is a fairly small show, but it is quite good.

The day was a lovely 20+ degrees (Celsius) with not a cloud in the sky. We arrived at 9am and the parking was easy.

I was very pleased that there were a couple of bullocks at the show. These immense animals used to be used throughout Australia to haul timber out of the bush. They caused less damage to the land, cost less to run and were much more environmentally friendly.

Bullocks have a nice temperament and are immensely strong.

Here’s an animal that not many people would expect to see at an agricultural show … the humble Australian emu.

The animal nursery was, once again, somewhere that my youngest daughter just HAD to go to. Most of the animals in the nursery were the property of the Jordan River School (Previously the Brighton Agricultural College). One of the blokes there had just finished his Veterinary training and decided to come along and help out.

One of the local horse studs brought some of their absolutely drop-dead gorgeous Friesians

 

The Friesian isn’t a massive horse, but they are very pretty. A friend of mine breeds Friesians, his horses are absolutely lovely.

Well, the main reason that I was at the Brighton Show was to watch the Dairy Goat judging.

The goats were lovely, and the goat breeders were, as always, friendly and very helpful.

We went and had a look in the poultry display and had a look at the animals that were in there. There were some great looking birds in there. My favourite birds there were the Australorps.

Milk Step

The final piece of the hurdle construction was the addition of a step that our smallest daughter can use to reach the letterbox.

In the past, the gate post had a small platform attached to it so that milk could be left at the gate, or bread … or parcels.

The step is simply an extension to the rails at the bottom of the hurdle with some timber attached across it to form a step or shelf.

The rails have been attached to the posts using decking screws and have been set level rather than parallel to the ground. I have also screwed the shelf laths onto the rails using the decking screws. This should make the shelf last pretty well. The timber that I’ve used is treated exterior grade rough sawn pine, so it should last pretty well too.

The last task for this fence is to attach the fence wire to the hurdle and then tension it. I will probably need to cut the mesh around the shelf so that it will wrap around the post properly.

I got my daughter to climb up onto the step to make sure that it was high enough, and it worked out pretty well. I thought that the lathes might come out too far and stop the gate from closing, so I was prepared to cut some of them for the gate … but luckily, the gate closes just fine, with about an inch to spare.

While poking around in the letter box, we noticed that there was some water pooling in it. I will need to put a couple of holes in the bottom of the letterbox so that the mail doesn’t turn into paper soup.

Egg Sales

After some poking around on the interweb, I discovered that I have to label the eggs that I sell … even though I have a flock of less than 20 hens. There are a couple of pieces of legal instruments that cover the production of eggs for sale. The Tasmanian Food Act, the Egg Standard and the Animal Welfare legislation. From these three instruments I discovered that:

1. I do not need to be licensed as an egg producer or carry an egg producers license because I have less than 20 hens;
2. I am subject to the Food Act as a backyard poulterer irrespective of the number of hens I have because I am selling, gifting or otherwise providing a foodstuff; and
3. As a consequence of 2 … I have to follow the standards for labelling from the Egg Standards.

Well, it isn’t that much of a problem. It increases my costs by about $0.50 per dozen eggs to cover the cost of egg cartons, sticky labels and printing (I’m printing the labels myself). It just means that the $5.00 I charge for a dozen free range eggs means slightly less profit. My chickens lay, on average, 3-4 eggs per day which means I get about 9 dozen eggs per month. After feed costs and now carton and labelling costs … my profit has just gone down to $5 per month or the princely sum of $60 per annum! Woohoo … here comes my retirement fund! It’s a good thing that I do this for our own health and welfare rather than as a business.

Gate Hardware done

I’ve put the gate hardware onto the hurdle. The drill bit that I used was a little large for the hardware, so I have set it into the post with a 2 part epoxy. I know that that means that when I have to replace it (eventually) it will be a pain … but, whatever. I’ll burn that bridge when I cross it.

The fence post is a little bit high for my youngest darling daughter to reach into the letterbox. So I am going to build a step into the post for her. I’ve seen these steps on other fence posts before, they used to be used for putting things like milk bottles on back in the old days when you used to get milk delivered. They are also used for parcels, etc. I think that it will be useful for our daughter.

The step is simply a pair of rails with a cross piece to step on.

I still have a couple of fence rails left over from making the sheep pen, so I will simply screw these into the hurdle at both ends, with a bit extending out of the front. The step is another offcut that is then screwed to the rails.

This weekend, I want to put the fence wire back up and strain it against the hurdle. It shouldn’t take long … but before I can do that, there are some other parts of the fence that need repairing, plus, it is the Brighton Show this weekend and I have promised my youngest to go (we want to watch the goat judging for more experience).

Over one hurdle

Today, I finished making the fence hurdle for the farm gate. I still haven’t put the gate hardware onto the fencepost, but it is done for now.

The first job today was cutting the checks and fitting the crossbar.

The check was cut by cutting across the post and then using a chisel to chip out the rebate. I marked the rebate by placing the cross bar across the two posts and marking where the cross bar would sit. Then I marked the depth of the cross bar using a square. I used a bush saw to make the cut as it was in a difficult position and the bush saw has an aggressive cut.

The next thing was to drill through the post and into the cross beam and then drive the coach bolt into the hurdle using a crescent wrench. I was going to drive a “nail” made from a piece of steel reinforcing rod, but the coach bolt seemed a better choice as it would also draw the pieces together.

The post was then cemented in properly. I mixed up the concrete in a big bucket and then poured it into the hole. After that, I tapped the concrete so that the mix was smooth on top. I also wanted to avoid having water sitting in a hole where it would rot the timber over time.

The final job for the day, was to put on our new letter box. I had already drilled and riveted the house number onto the letter-box. The letterbox was my darling daughters choice. I’d like to replace the rivets that the letterbox was constructed with, as they are pretty poorly done. Some of the rivets are set at an angle and it would be easy to catch clothing or skin on these rivets.

I will need to make a small step at the foot of the fence post, as our youngest daughter isn’t quite able to reach the letterbox.

I’ll make a fence style type step for my daughter so that she can stand on the step and see into the letterbox.

I also intent to put some fence rails on the hurdle to make it stronger and more attractive.

Fence Fix-up

Today, I bought some fence posts and tools for fixing the fence. The fence post at the farm gate has been in a terrible state since we moved in to this property and it has been my intention to replace it when I had the opportunity. Well, the opportunity presented itself. I want to be able to run the sheep in our lower paddock (where our driveway is). To do this, I need to fix the fence between us and two of our neighbours.

I bought six squared fence posts and ten round posts.

The first thing that needed to be done was to remove the old rotten fence post and it’s supporting pair. The old fence post had a bazillion old staples in it from previous “enhancements” but it was populated by a huge host of detritus eaters (slaters mostly) and several spiders and scorpions. The fence post was also being supported by a star-post. With the fence wire and the star post removed, I was able to pull the post from the ground and then lug it to the bonfire pit. After that, I dug out the fence post hole and enlarged it so that the new post would be OK for the gate.

The supporting post was broken off at the ground so it was just a matter of detaching it from the fence wire. However, to dig a new fence post hole, I had to dig out the broken off bit of the fence post that was under ground. This took some doing as the fence post was set in wet clay and the ground didn’t want to give up it’s bit of rotting wood. When I measured up the hole so that the two posts were set far enough apart for the cross-beam, the old fence post was precisely in the way. So it did have to come out.

This is all that was left of the old fence post. I had to use a crow-bar to lever the post out … the sucking sound it made when coming out of the ground was … special.

Next, dig out the fence post hole.

After that, I set the posts in the holes and did some back-filling and packing. My darling wife was on hand to hold the posts in place while I did the shovelling and packing. The next job was putting some cement into the holes so that the posts are well strengthened.

You can see that the fence posts are set to the right distance so that the cross beam sits properly. When the concrete goes off, I will cut a check into each of the fence posts so that the cross beam sits flush with the top of the posts.

The check is simply a shallow rebate cut into the top of the fence post. When the fence wire is attached to the final fence post and it is tensioned, the final post is pulled toward the supporting fence post and the cross beam is held tightly between the two posts.

After the two posts are connected via the cross beam, I’ll drill a hole into the posts that passes into the middle of the cross beam and hammer a 1 foot piece of steel reo, kind of like a really big nail.

I have another fence post to replace which will be a bit more tricky because it connects three fences. When I have set the other fence post, I will be able to tension the fence between us and the lower neighbours and then I’ll hang the new fence netting. For that, I’m going to use an old fishing net and I have bought a pair of shears to cut the heavy nylon netting to fit the height of the fence.

After the fence is finished, I’ll be able to let the chooks out again and the sheep into the lower paddock.