…is not the easiest thing to accomplish.
That’s Neighbor D. Last year we put in their round pen, but L also wants an arena. Took several days to clear out some junipers and months, off and on, to get the land suitably level and haul in sand. Now we’re setting the posts for a fence a horse can bounce off of without injury to either the horse or the fence. Each of those posts is planted 3 feet down. Perfectly straight, of course, because D&L.
Unfortunately the first line of holes wasn’t perfectly straight, so it took time.
Now I’ve brought the boys home and wolfed down some lunch, and I’m off to dig more holes. Which, I confess, is the part I don’t really enjoy very much.
I went college to avoid digging ditches. Postholes are worse if there are rocks. I hate rocks.
Joel, this might be the time for explosives or sumthin’. Small ones, just to loosen the soil, y’know.
On a couple of them where we hit solid clay, we discussed explosives. Fortunately – and shockingly – we didn’t encounter any rocks today.
Holy crap. You guys SERIOUSLY need a tractor-mounted auger.
Used one. And it successfully dug about half the needed holes, but the other half had to be done the old-fashioned way.
Post hole diggers are the devils tool! I have used a hand auger to dig many holes here around SE AZ. Always hit rock. Sometimes a little water poured in the hole helps, other times it makes sticky, hard to move clay. I would hire this kind of work done but am to cheap and have to much excess time not to do it myself. A railroad bar helps bust up hard caliche type soils, but is might hard on the shoulders.
I’m certain the hole-digging thing is what drove the invention of the steel T-post.
Unfortunately, they cannot replace the conventional wood post in certain applications . . . more’s the pity. You have my heartfelt sympathy.
Fences, like everything else but especially fences, are governed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Entropy in a closed system always increases, which is why you have to fix them all the time (thus injecting energy into the system).