Fence Fights

The fenceline between our lower field and the neighbors' manicured lawns runs along a hedgerow. With any luck, your collective memories are scanty as mine and you won't remember from last summer when I proudly posted that my girls and I patched it all up so the horses could graze in that field once again.
Not that our patches haven't held nicely to the effects of wind and weather and the push/pull nature of errant vines. I'm sure these are all new areas of the fenceline that have recently become red-carpet invitations for my horses to walk on through to where the grass is, quite literally, greener and weed-free.
Invitations with the not-so-surprising result that a neighbor woke up one early summer morning to a new, adorable lawn ornament in the form of our yearling colt Pippin.
After sheepishly collecting him, we returned him to our upper field where, all summer, along with his Mom Genevieve and his baby brother Finnegan and their six goat friends, they have chewed what little grass there was down to nubs. At this point, what with all the heat waves and grazing going on, we look like dirt farmers.

So I ordered some new fencing materials and waited for the perfect day low in humidity and high in childhood summer laziness, and ordered the troops outside to put in a couple hundred feet of fence.

You'll remember, I'm confident, the wails and moans from the cherry tree branches debacle. Similar effects can be obtained when mandating that their behinds get busy constructing a fence.

But get busy they did, and over two days' time they pounded in t-posts, measured distances, lugged wire panels into place and fought battles with little wire clips.
The big boys got to feel like the men they like to think they are as I handed them my keys and asked them to drive up to where the panels had been deposited, tie them to the back of my car (which is a wannbe pick-up truck) and drive them back down to where we were working.

At long last, after much toil and sweat and a healthy dose of bickering (I called the blue pliers!) the fence was complete and we turned the horses into the field. One mouthful of that sweet long grass and their eyes rolled back into their heads in delight.

We then took the kids into town for some water ice, where their eyes rolled back into.... oh you get the point.

Good job kids!









This is the field they were grazing on....

And this is their new and improved field.