The fence finally is up

Well I've dropped the ball lately with writing my blog posts, but much of it was due to getting work done.

One of the many projects that I've been working on has been my hops fence made out of the pallets that I got off Craigslist for free. As I've shown already, I got the first couple posts in and then hit a sewer tile pipe. It took a while for me to figure out what to do about it. I expanded the hole and it only made it more complicated. An old insurance map showed me that I had hit where the downspout entered the ground from the corner of an old building that has since been demolished. As I dug the hole wider I found even more parts of cisterns for holding the runoff water.

So as I discovered more, it made it harder to push ahead and get the last fence post set. Luckily the day that I brought the sledgehammer down to bust up the pipe, I got some help from the neighborhood kids to help me finish digging the last bit of the hole.

Here is a picture mid-sledgehammering after I had demo-ed the first cistern and was partially through the second one:

I took out what I needed to in order to make room for the fence post and made sure to leave a portion of the pipe. The branch of the Y pipe that went into the old filled-in cistern was carefully cemented so that water could sill flow through the rest of the Y in case the pipe was still active.  

After setting the last fence post, I didn't have enough time to put up the fence post before Spring in our Steps had their Jaunty Jubilee walk come down my alley. So I tied on a section of pallets to the posts to give them an idea of what to expect. Very snazzy:

Fortunately the next day Kevin Wolf came down to give me a hand in raising the fence for real and I think we did a decent job. 

There are still portions that need to be strengthened. As I learned from a neighbor I need to add some additional diagonal braces so that the 12 ft sections don't sag. Halfway down installing them as of tonight. But for the most part it'll be ready for hops come spring once I put up the cables for them to grow around. I'll probably wait until the spring to install the cables though.