Sunday, May 24, 2009

digging post holes

Seriously, how did New Hampshire settlers dig post holes for their livestock fence by hand without power tools? Oh, I know, they DIDN'T. They built stone walls, because building walls out of granite was easier then digging three feet into New Hampshire soil.

We're slowly plugging away at all the fence posts needed to build the paddock and fencing in the field, Generally, the auger only gets us 18 inches or so down, then the rest is hand digging, as rocks and hard packed clay bind up the auger easily.

We tried to focus on one fence post at a time, but it's easy to get overwhelmed at the total number of posts that need to go in. There is no doubt about it, this is hard work. But you know what they say, anything worth having isn't easy to come by.

2 comments:

Nana said...

Wow, lot's of hard work.
I'm sure it will all pay off, hard work always does.

Very proud of you and your sweet family.

Lorraine

Jon Daley said...

You can try it out down here, where the boys and I just dug five 24 inch holes for a playset - all clay, and so it went pretty quickly. Not so good for growing things, but very nice to dig in.