[This is the first in a series of articles I intend to write. Check back later for articles on making sassafras root beer, drying firewood, picking berries, and various other subjects.]
I did a lot of research before building a fence around my yard. Like so many subjects, fence building brings out a variety of opinions. What is “best” is relative to what materials are available in your area. Fences can be made from many materials. While I think immediately of wood as the material of choice, I also remember flying over Ireland once and seeing stone fences covering the landscape and dividing sheep farm from sheep farm for miles in every direction. In the city chain-link fences are more common.
The type of terrain you’re building your fence on will also impact your design choices. Slopes are a dreaded enemy of the fence builder. And if you find a how-to video they’ll almost always be working in perfectly flat conditions. There are two main ways to work with a slope when building a fence. You can either make the fence in “steps” where the top and bottom of each section are horizontal to the earth, or you can have your fence follow the contours of the land. The benefit of the stepped look is that it has that horizontal precision, but the detriment is that there will be serious gaps on the bottom of the fence which let in critters unless those gaps can be closed off in some way. Contoured fences might look zig-zagged at all sorts of angles, but they solve the barricade problem. For myself, a major goal was to keep groundhogs out of the yard, so I chose the contoured look.
Then there are the challenges of price and of function of materials. You can block everything out with a privacy fence but you’ll use a lot more wood and therefore spend a lot more money. I still wanted to keep chickens, dogs, and kids IN, and deer, groundhogs, and neighbors OUT. So the best solution for my circumstances I determined to be a type of fence common on many farms. Perhaps it looks too rural for some in an urban environment, but I like the look.
The idea is like this: put in a 4”x4” post every 8 feet. (Rounded posts also work) The 4×4 posts come in a standard length of 8 ft, and you’re going to want to sink them 3 ft into the ground. You’ll quickly find out that you don’t have just nice clean dirt, but rocks and roots as well. So there are two general approaches. Dig and pour concrete, or pound the posts in. Digging is not easy. By hand can take a long time. Gas-powered augers are dangerous and don’t work well in rocks and roots. I recommend pounding the posts in. You’ll skip out on all the bags of concrete, the cost of them and the mess it all makes. But how do you pound a post into the ground? They make metal pounders that have two handles, but these are usually for small round metal posts and its another tool you’d have to buy that you won’t use again. Farmers pound posts in with a larger machine, but that cost a lot more money to buy. So unless you have a farmer friend to help, you’ll need to find your own way. Start with a crow bar and poke a hole in the ground. Spin the bar around in increasingly larger circles as you get deeper and deeper to open up space for the post to be pounded into the dirt. When you hit a rock or root, you’ll have to find a new location or do the hard work by hand to remove them. You then need to cut the tip of the 4×4 into a sharp point. I cut them from all four sides at about a 25 degree angle. You could probably get away with cutting angles on just two opposites sides, but four is slightly better. Then, here’s the trick I found in an old book. You need a big hammer. Put the post in the hole and hit is with all you got, and do it again and again, checking the level in all directions between each hit. If the post is not going in, you’ll need a bigger hammer. In the end I used a 55 lb kettlebell. And you need to find a way to get above the post so you can hit it with your hammer or kettlebell. While it sounds pretty dangerous, I stood on a ladder to do the work and managed to avoid injury. In some locations I built a stack of pallets to stand on. Each kettlebell slam on the top of a post could sink it 1” at a time. But the posts are also liable to split, so you need to look at making a temporary metal cover on the top. A large soup can might work. A welded up sacrificial cap is even better. If you can’t get the posts in a full 3 ft, its probably ok to have some of them go only 2 ft or 2 ½ ft in. If the posts ever come out in the spring, take the advice of a farmer I spoke to: hit the posts back in!
Once you have your first post in, then go to the next corner of your yard and sink in another post. Connect then with a string to ensure that the post in-between are on a perfect line. Sink the rest of the posts on the 8ft intervals.
Then add a five foot tall wire mesh along the entire fence. Four foot is common but too easy for deer to jump over, so go with 5ft to match the height of the posts. You want wire mesh with spacing that keeps out critters. I found a type that has openings of 2” by 4”. Then I designed my own “puller” system using a cum-a-long, and a couple 5ft 2x4s. I sandwiched the wire fence between the two boards and screwed the boards together using 5 deck screws. This spread out the force so the metal wouldn’t pull out or bow in the center. On the other end of the cum-a-long I used a chained tied to a tree or to a deep-set post. You want the wire extra tight, and then use large fencing staples to attach it to each post. A half dozen staples per post works well. When dealing with the contours of the land you may frequently have to cut the metal fence and “start over” on a new trajectory from the previous post. After the wire is attached, connect the posts with four horizontal 1×6 boards. (Hence why this is often called a “4-board horse fence.”) These boards are best when made of white oak, but other species are used. The bottom board should be about 6” from the ground. Too close and it will rot out more quickly. Too far away and your wire mesh has less strength to keep our critters. The top board should be at the full 5ft height of the fence. The middle boards are to be spaced evenly in the remaining space. If you are making the fence for horse, the boards go OUTSIDE of the posts, so that the boards will pull out at the nails and cause less injury if a horse charges through them.
At the end of the project you can cut your fence post tops on an angle to have water drain off them better. Or do as I did and apply a generous quantity of Titebond 3 wood glue to prevent water from getting into the grain. It is also common to use a board vertically to cover of the ends of the horizontal boards where they come together on a post. This will hide all gaps and imperfect angles.
Gates need to be built as well, but that is another subject all its own.
The whole project for me, about 225 ft of fence (in the year 2024) cost me maybe $3,000 of materials and probably a good 150-200 hours of work spread out over a summer. I think paying someone to do the work here in New York could easily have been $15,000.