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Buildin' a fence 2011-08-27
Earlier this year Jericho, myself, and a bunch of friends and family planted a little orchard at the farm in Maine. This week I built a fence around it.

Happily mowing was mostly taken care of before I arrived:




So it was easy to work around the trees and along the eventual fence-line.

I started at the corners of the area and drove 8 foot steel t-posts:



Using a post driver:



This was actually a lot easier than I expected, perhaps because of the heavy rains on the preceding evenings. I strung 12 gauge monofilament wire between these to define a straight line:



I used the line to place intermediate t-posts:



After 15 t-posts were up and connected with monofilament, I hung deer netting from it:



This part seemed harder than driving the t-posts, maybe because I was already somewhat tired from that earlier activity, and maybe because this activity mostly involved holding my arms above my head for long periods of time doing more close-detail work.

I started by zip-tying the net to the monofilament to temporarily fight sag between posts:



Then I used inline tensioners to take up the slack:



The bottom of the net is held down with sod staples:




The netting quickly vanishes as you move away from it, so I also flagged each stretch:



Some loose ends still need to be wrapped up. I found some ferrules at the hardware store to secure the monofilament, but I haven’t tried crimping them yet. The zip-ties need to be replaced with a more robust solution. And the deer net needs to be secured to each t-post to keep it from billowing so much.