80AcresOnline

In our house, fencing has two meanings: the stuff I do with swords (Renaissance style) and the stuff we both do with posts and wire and clamshell posthole diggers and shovels and so on.   Often my husband works on fence alone.   I have books to write.  When he’s sick or injured, the fence projects languish…and sometimes it’s just too hot to get out there.

Winter is a fine time to work on fence, and he’s been busy on the west end fence since some windstorms dropped trees on it.

Yes, there’s a fence under that limb nearest the camera.

A week or so ago he finished the T-intersection where our south fence runs into the west fence, with additional bracing to handle both south of our line and running north.

The west fence runs approximately a quarter mile to the next corner.  Some parts we’ve worked on before, but it’s time to make it all right and tight.   Yesterday, after putting one of the big posts in down the line, he decided it was six inches off the boundary.  That meant pulling the post out (by hand), redigging the hole, and putting it back in.

It’s a BIG pole.  It’s a LONG pole.  It won’t have to be done again.

The “thonk” noise when it hit bottom was impressive

We don’t want the big post to lean in any direction.

Those piles of dirt need to go in the hole.

After the post and dirt were in, he took the chainsaw down to clear the fence of the newest blow-downs.  I took the camera and found this:

Both the yaupon and possumhaw suffered in the drought and summer’s extreme heat this year; we were afraid we wouldn’t see any of the bright, cheerful winter berries…but they are, on at least this (one of the thickest-berried, usually.)

None of my bird pictures came out today (a hammock is not a steady base for photography!) but we had four or five species of wintering sparrows at Owl Water, more Fox Sparrows than I’ve ever seen at one time before.   Also five (or maybe six) Harris’s Sparrows, as well as White-crowned,  Chipping, and (heard only) White-throated.

Another survivor of the drought and heat was this Mealy Blue Sage–it died to the ground in summer (the dead stalks as visible) but returned with the first rain this fall and is actually blooming, rather cautiously.