Fencing…..

We chose to use electrical fencing to contain our goats and horses.  The problem with electrical fencing is that it frequently needs maintenance; fixing wire that has stretched too much, cutting away trees and brush from the fence line, and cutting down the weeds underneath the wire so that it the electrical current is not shorted out.     
Perhaps our neighbor, Arthur, has fencing maintenance figured out.  He simply loads some spray in his tractor sprayer and goes along and sprays his fence line.  Easy and quick.  It seems as though whatever “miracle spray” he uses has a residual affect because it his spray job will work for almost a year before he has to re-spray.  Both Carl and I normally spend a few weekends each year on fencing maintenance.  
We aren’t quite sure what the “miracle spray” does for the wildlife so we have not decided that approach is best for this farm.  Now that we have put off fencing much too long; the goats are once again storming the chicken coop each day eating the chicken’s grain, and now the goats are escaping out of the fencing area only to find our “grain stash’ in our equipment barn. (The equipment barn is not near the goats fencing area; however, the goats still discovered the stash!  We are temporarily storing grain in our market van so the goats can’t find it.  The goats and rats seem to always find it no mater where it is stored.) Our plan was to do fencing once mid summer but we never found time outside of our vegetable production.    
So here it is winter and that is what we have done all weekend; weed eat under the wires, cut away multi-flora roses, and put up new T-Posts in the woods where the wire began growing into the pine trees.  We bought this new fancy tool – a weed eater on wheels – so we were excited about this job because we thought we could cut our labor spent on fencing in half.  So we brought the cool new weed eater on wheels up to the pasture.  But we were WRONG….  We went through 15 strings in just 20 feet because the weed eater would not cut through our weeds.  So we ended up using our STHL weed eater that we had just gotten back from the repair shop.  Our STHL is so much better after being repaired – we can start it and it will continue running – so I used the weed eater underneath the wire in the goat fencing area while Carl used our D.R. Mower in the horse pasture.     
To keep our goats contained, it requires 5 strands of electrical wire, but horses only need 2 strands of wire.  Our D.R. Mower works great for the horse fencing because there is enough room between the ground and the wire for the mower, but goat fencing only has a foot between the ground and the wire.  Goats are adventurous and always trying to escape.