The short and the long of digging a fence post

The short of it

I put in a fence post today:


The long of it

Clearly our pigs can't be allowed to fly at will. So fencing the veggie patch with wild-boar-and-presumably domestic-pig-proof fencing has leapt in front of the chicken house as Priority Number One (capitals mine).

The last two days have seen me put in two fence posts a day. Not in the old way, but by the book - the book being Michael Roberts' "Farm and Smallholder Fencing". (At least I thought I was doing it by the book, but the book tells me that "straining posts" should be dug three to four feet into the ground instead of my paltry 50 cm.

I won't tell anyone if you don't.)

So confident was I, I took the camera to show you how nice and easy it is.

I started with a nice, clean shot of all the tools you need:


Then, after a few centimeters, I took an amusingly unexpected shot of a rock in the hole:


Not wanting to move the hole (this was for a gate post and I'd decided the gate was going to be 'yey' wide) and realising that every hole is different, I decided to go through the rock. I thought it would be interesting to see what was on the other side.

I never found out:


Spoil (on something to keep the job nice and clean) is supposed to be brown and earthy. This was largely pulverised limestone.

My nice, clean working area wasn't:


And I ended up using some tools not in the original shot. To be fair, I did feel this was cheating in some kind of holistic way. Before fetching the sledgehammer, another hammer and a rock splitter, I'd been doing very well using the pointed crowbar as a kind of ground-to-underground missile. (In fact, none of these other tools came close to being as effective.)

I did remember to document ramming the earth back in:


And got a nice, clean shot of the end result:


Especially compared to the gate post (yey metres away) I put in two days ago.