FENCE IN, FENCE OUT

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

The best time to collect and bark posts is when you're clearing land. (That's a good chore to do during the winter, when the sap is down which will make your posts last a lot longer and when you can move around in the brush a lot easier.) All the wood you cut will be useful and after you've set aside timber trees and kindling brush, you should have a good supply of stove wood and plenty of fence supports left over.

Save every solid cored tree with a diameter of over three inches inside the bark. Straight lengths are great, but even a crooked as around's leg post is useful if it has one straight plane to nail wire to. Trunks three to five inches thick (after barking) should be cut seven feet long for line posts. Heavier timbers up to eight inches in diameter make good corner, gate, and reinforcing posts and should be sawed into eight foot lengths.

Posts can be used immediately after they're cut when you're in a` hurry. If you have time to season the trunks, however, pile them on a layer' of brush to keep them up off the ground. (Crisscross the layers to let air circulate and speed up the drying.) Bill likes to let his supply of posts season at least a year, and whenever he has a chance he adds new timbers to the stack aging in his yard. You'll find the fence supports much easier to peel if you can follow Deavers' system.

PEELING

Yes, you really do have to remove the bark from fencepost's not from the whole length, but definitely from two areas. One is the wire side of every upright, which must be bared so that the staples can grip solid material. The other is 'the bottom three feet of each line post (four feet in the case of a corner post). If you don't peel this lower end before you soak the wood, you'll waste a lot of preservative. Also, bark left on at ground level provides a damp, lightless "welcome mat" for boring insects and rot. Be sure that all your wooden supports are stripped to several inches above the point to which they will be buried.

A sharp hatchet or machete is hefty enough for the bark-peeling job. Any heavier tool, in fact, is going to be much too heavy after the first 20 or so posts.

Incidentally, you'd better know which end of each post is which before you begin peeling. According to Bill, "The lower end, nature's way, is the one that should go in the ground. The branch knots won't rot as easy that way.

"Look at a peeled post. You can tell which end is up by the rings around a knot. They're tight on the up side and sag on the down side. Put your posts in right the first time and they'll last 30, 40 years."

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print