Happy 4-20

Ok, so we don't celebrate 4-20 in the "traditional" sense, but we did have some fun today.

One thing we did was start setting up our solar electric fence. We got the insulators nailed into handy trees and added step-in fiberglass posts in places where more support was needed. We also ran two strands of electric fence wire and put one safety handle on the bottom strand. I still need to get another safety handle for the top strand.

Awhile back, I purchased a 10 watt solar panel and a 12 volt low impedance fence charger. I already have a charge controller on hand and a battery I can use for the fence. The reason for using two strands of wire is so that we can put either a pig or a goat in the enclosure and not be concerned with a pig going under or a goat going over. When it's all set up and operational, I'll share pictures and a story with them.

We also added a section of field fence from the back corner of our house over to an older existing fence so that chickens or goats that are in the side yard area can't get out into the garden. We had to put up other fencing close to the front of the house and near the pen where the does live on account of chickens tearing up the gardens.

The biggest thing we did today, though, was cut down an old, dead double-trunk tree that could have fallen on our house during a recent severe storm. It's been dead a couple of years, but that storm was bad enough that I was afraid the tree would wind up in my kitchen! I took a short video of the felling of the second trunk of the tree. You can see straps tied to it leading down the hill to another tree where they were wrapped around that second tree and tied to a 4-wheeler. My son was on the 4-wheeler keeping the straps pulled tight and my son-in-law manned the chainsaw to cut the tree down. Without those straps, the old tree would probably have landed on the house since it was leaning in that way and all the limbs were on that side.

On to the video!