I finally got that front wall done!
The rain came to a stop this afternoon, so I headed out and grabbed the draw knife so I could put points on the prepared stakes I’d made for the chain link fence bed’s deadwood wall. That did not take long.
With the rain we’ve been having, I took advantage of the soil being softer, making it easier to drive the stakes into place.
In the first picture, you can see I’ve laid out the sharpened stakes in the most open spaces between the current vertical supports.
These were all much longer than needed. Even with the softened soil, there was only so far I could drive them into the ground.
The second image shows all the stakes pounded into place. In the third image, I’ve taken the loppers to all of the new stakes, cutting them down to just a bit above the height of the deadwood wall.
The charred stakes are staggered, but where the inside stakes were places were not consistent in relation to the taller outside stakes. For the most part, the stake placement for of zig zagged across, but there were a few places where there were two stakes on the outside without a matching stake on the inside. So I decided to use some of the pieces I’d trimmed off that were longer, and set them in the gaps. They didn’t get pushed down into the ground too far, or they would have been too short, but I hand pushed them in to match the other posts in height, more or less.
I did end up having to rifle through some other leftover bits to find one last piece long enough.
After that, I used up all the smaller pieces of deadwood we gathered fall and tried to fill in as many gaps as I could. Then I grabbed the loppers and went back into the spruce grove to try and fine more that were thin and pliable enough to fill in more gaps. I ended up harvesting some younger poplars – gosh, those spread fast – to fill in more spaces. After a while, I decided an needed more height, so I went back into the spruce grove and went hunting. I was able to find some tall, mostly straight, cherry to use.
I plan to remove all of those cherry trees in the spruce grove. They don’t produce much, if anything, at all. We’ll keep the one by the house, as the house provides enough of a microclimate for it to procure lots of fruit. The rest can go.
But not today.
After cutting and trimming the straightest once I could get, I set them in between the stakes. Then I used twine to zig zag from stake to stake, pushing down the wall in places. I wanted to make sure the stakes – especially the extra lengths I added didn’t get pushed away from the middle, plus the twine will help push down the deadwood, reducing gaps a bit that way, too.
There are still gaps, though not as much. I have decided I will stuff straw against the front wall as a soil barrier, before replacing the soil I took out so I could start this project. Once the soil is back, I will use one of the hoop kits to attach to the taller takes, then put netting over the whole thing, to keep the cats out as well as the Chinese elm seeds then they start drifting. At that point, it will be ready for planting. I believe I will be planting winter squash in here, where they can use the fence as a trellis. This will likely not be the only place I transplant winter squash into, though.
We’ll see how the weather treats us over the next while!!
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 