The Fence

What an exciting day. The T-posts finally arrived at Slegg so I picked up those and a few rolls of plastic fencing as my first order of business today. We started banging away shortly after 10am. Despite the soil being full of stones, the T-posts went in pretty easily. A few got sidetracked and had to be bent back to make them plumb. I built a wide gate out of 2"X2" that I'm not particularly proud of; well, not until I finish reinforcing it so it doesn't wobble. It's hung on a T-post supported by another T-post 10' away. It's ok for the short term but it too is kinda hokey. I was planning to build a tomato trellis using T-posts but now I'm wondering whether they will be strong enough.

The 7' black plastic polypropylene fence went up really quickly and easily but whether it actually keeps deer out is the question. At 7', deer can jump over or through it but probably won't unless they're spooked. This is more likely to happen if we leave the gate open and then try to get it out too aggressively. High tensile page wire would have been the preferred option except that we don't know how long we'll be on this land. If we get kicked off or leave voluntarily, we'll be able to take everything down even easier than it went up. Page wire would have been more costly up front, more time and harder to take down and re-use.


While I was finishing up the fence, P planted our 40 tomato starts, about half of which came from Haliburton (thanks Marty, Elmarie and Dale). They're all completely mixed up so when a tomato appears ripe, we will pick it and see how it tastes. We also planted a bunch of campari tomatoes that I started from seed which are probably my favourite supermarket frankenhybrid. I read on the internet (so I assume it's true) that, despite it being a crazy trademarked license-only hybrid, it will produce fruit much like its parent fruit. We'll see.

Next on deck: squash. The starts we got from Hali have tons of flowers and even some fruit but are starting to seriously wilt in their 3" pots. I may delay the tomato trellis until after the squash are in.