Friday, August 17, 2018

Fencing in the Goats

With Francis the Goat having figured out how to jump over then fence, the task now is to come up with a working solution to prevent that. I'm looking into something that the farm can provide, as apposed to buying fencing. I could always resort to a hotwire (and perhaps I will need to do that in the long run), but I'd rather try something more self reliant. A few weeks ago while visiting another farm, I saw how they tied bamboo poles to a field fence in order to give privacy. Toying with this idea, I morphed it a bit into a fence height extender. 

Introducing the guava pole fence extender...........

Simple. Easy. Cheap. And hopefully when it's completed, it will look "woodsy & farmy", plus keep the goats inside their pasture pen. 

I have quite a nice guava pole production area which I've been harvesting for years to make garden markers, trellises, barrier fences, etc. Now those saplings are really going to come in handy. 

Above, a pile of poles ready to weave into the fence. This is going to take a lot of poles! 

With the guava pole forest being very crowed, the saplings grow tall, somewhat straight, with very few side branches. Perfect for garden poles. Looks like they will be good for this project too. 


Adam has been gathering poles, a slow process but not all that difficult. Their size and shape don't need to be perfect for this task. They just have to be thin enough to weave into the fence. 


No fasteners needed. Just weave them into the fence and they stay in place. Presently Adam is spacing them apart several inches, basically using one pole per fence square. We shall see if this is close enough to thwart a goat. 



2 comments:

  1. Very interesting solution. Certainly easier than refencing or even adding another layer of fence for height (I've done that for chickens!). It will be interesting to see what your goats think. :)

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  2. I did the same thing when my goats started hopping the fence. I found it's mostly a visual barrier so 1 pole every other square worked for me.

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