Fencing

We've been working our a##es off lately and this last weekend was no different. After getting our fence posts in last week, we needed to get on to installing the electric wire, gates, solar engergizer, and ground rods. If you are not aware, our weather has not been great, with several inches of snow having fallen, most of it still on the ground. This has made working outdoors difficult & messy. It's not quite cold enough to be frozen solid, but it's not quite warm enough to melt everything either. It's just ugly.
All the "stuff" for our fences arrived safely last week, thanks to John and Lesley at Ferris Fencing in Courtenay, BC.

The heavy coils of HotCote wire and the solar energizer arrived directly from the manufacturer in the USA with the remainder coming from Ferris on the Island.
We quickly realized that we needed some way to unwind the wire in a way that enabled us to feed it through all the insulators (900+) that Carol had installed on the posts, without binding up or kinking. After some Googling we discovered the device we needed was a "spinning jenny".

Of course nobody in town had one in stock but Tom at The Horse Barn ordered one up and promised it would be here late on Saturday. We spent Saturday putting in some of the many gates we would need and installing a few of the ratcheting tensioners that mount on the terminal posts. I went into town, picked up the spinning jenny, brought it home and assembled it ready for use on Sunday morning. Sunday was foggy and snowing when we first went out but it didn't take long for the fog to burn off revealing beautiful skies and even a little sunshine.

 The spinning jenny worked great and we quickly became electric fence wire stringing experts. Good thing, as we have 2 miles of the stuff to install! By the end of the day (and the end of the light) we had one of the paddocks almost completely fenced in with only a couple of short sections still needing wire. We have yet to brace the terminal and corner posts so could only apply very light tension to hold everything together. The bracing rails will be here on Wednesday so that job can be completed and the fence brought up to full tension. And so it goes...

I've included a couple of other shots to show off our "Muskoka" wood rack that we keep in the house. As you can see, Ben loves laying in front of the fire!

The other image shows Carol preparing a meal on our wood stove. She's become very good at this great energy conserving method of cooking. We have the stove going anyway to heat the house so this was just a no-brainer. BTW, it was a very tasty beef stew! Mmmmmmmm