When we first got the sheep, HA had a simple plan she’d heard from a friend of ours who used to raise sheep: tether them to an old tire and we could move them around to where we needed them to mow.
It didn’t work.
Vinda somehow figured out how to open the bolt snap on his lead (amazing, really). Then he’d dance around Lu (Naan wasn’t here yet) until Lu would eventually pull his head free from his collar trying to keep up. We tried things, but the boys just weren’t amenable to being tied down. We had just put in really good fencing to control the feral swine, so we decided to just let them free-range in the pasture.
That created a problem when HA wanted to start planting native trees and fruit trees and such. Each one needed a sturdy cage or the sheep would eat all the fresh, tender shoots and leaves. It was expensive and tedious to build the cages, and it made weeding around the new plantings a project. Then HA decided she wanted to start growing protea at scale. She put the sheep in the horse pasture to help clear it out while keeping the sheep away from the now-dozens of plantings in the main pasture. This happened while I was away, but by the time I returned the sheep had eaten through most of the forage in the horse pasture and needed to come out to the green grasses of the main pasture. HA wanted to enclose them in a portable electric fence, which we could then move around the pasture to control the mowing.
We found a local store with portable electric fencing. Neither of us had ever installed such a thing before, but it was pretty straightforward. There were two hitches:
ground rod
The store didn’t sell us a ground rod. A fence doesn’t need much. I had an 8’ rod left over from when I put temporary solar panels in the front yard, and it really needed to come out of the ground anyway (it’s kind of an injury risk), but it took several hours of twisting and pulling it with a big pipe wrench to get it out of the ground. Then I cut it down to 3’ so it won’t be such a proposition when we move the fencing.
corner posts
I didn’t realize that the portable fencing posts wouldn’t take the lateral strain at the corners of the enclosure. For corners, you need posts, and they can’t be metal. I thought we were stuck, until I remembered that HA had suggested fashioning posts for the now-removed plant cages from the ton of leftover PVC pipe that came with the property. They were perfect!
I don’t think we did too bad for first-timers. Vinda, Lu, and Naan are now happily munching on fresh, sweet grass in their new corral. We’ll probably expand it as we move it around.
—2p