The veggie bed is around (or more accurately, a rectangle) 40 metres by ten. To fence it against wild boar (and domestic pigs) it needs 1.5-metre posts embedding 40 cm into the ground every two metres, supporting barbed wire and stock fencing.
Or so we hope.
After all the tools I needed on the rock-hardened gate post last Thursday, it was liberating to walk across the field on Friday with just a sledgehammer, 1.5-metre crowbar, spirit level and tape measure.
For a few days - come rain, hail and sunshine (yes, the weather's gone a bit English), and accompanied by the confused but always chipper pigs - I diligently made holes for the posts by hitting the crowbar with the sledgehammer. Then, yesterday, a few centimetres below the surface, on the final stretch of the fence, I heard the solidly familiar clunk of crowbar meeting MASSIVE SLAB OF LIMESTONE. A few more delicate THWACKS with the sledgehammer and the end of my crowbar sort of... shattered.
Which left me with little choice but to adopt the drop and wiggle technique I'd already told you about. (If only I read these posts occasionally.) Once again, I found it highly effective. And effort less.
I smiled. Like the gentlemen in the previous post, I, too, had a secret weapon: A two-metre crowbar, brand new and unused, waiting to be taken back to the shop. When I bought it a few months ago, it was almost too heavy to lift.
Not so, today.
The rock still takes a while to get through - and some of my posts are only 30 cm into the ground - but when you find a piece of ground without rock (and there was one), it's a joy. You can put up a post in minutes.
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