When we were fencing back in March we used the old wooden vine posts that we’d recovered from the vineyards. Michael the sitcom neighbor walked around the vineyards with his dog Munson and pulled posts out of the ground. We’d gather them with the pickup truck. It was better than any gym.

To set the post Jean would hold it in the correct spot and I’d push it in with the tractor loader. It worked well enough until the drought took hold and the ground became too hard to push in the wooden posts. They cracked and broke. So we switched to metal vine posts.

These are cheap and I can plant them with a sledgehammer even in dry soil. They are also much faster to wire with these little plastic doohickeys that screw on instead of the wired-on ceramic insulators. I can get a few hundred meters of fence posted and wired in a day. [Then I collapse in a whining heap and demand a drink.]

I just finished fencing off some lucerne in the California paddock. This fence climbs a south-facing hill with soils that have a fair few little pebbles in them. The soils are also dry from the drought, so hammering posts is a fair bit of work. By them time I’ve done a few I start to feel it and my aim gets a little off center. A couple of mishits and I mangle the end of a post.

Now there are a lot of anthropomorphic posts keeping watch over the farm. I sleep better at night knowing these sentinels are out there.