Take two of these:

And turn them into two of these:

And you have two posts suitable for all kinds of uses. My use on my recent trip to Roundrock was to see how well they might work as support posts for the fencing we have put around our pine trees. Here is the result:

What do you think?

Here’s what I think: they’ll do. I need to refine my process a bit though. I made them too long. While Libby held the post in place, I had to wield the sledge hammer above my head to pound them in. I couldn’t get much force in my blows that way. Of course, the farther they went in the ground, the harder I could strike, so I’ve concluded that if I begin with shorter posts, I’ll have a better start.

We’d considered using cedars with even thinner diameter trunks so that we could slip the stake driver over them for pounding purposes, but I suspect a post that thin will be too wobbly for the job. It’s probably worth a try though in case I’m wrong. And in any case, I can afford to lose more cedars.

This brilliant idea — of using accessible and free resources for posts — will only work in the pine plantation where the soil is deep and loamy. I could never hope to pound a piece of wood into the rocky soil of the pecan plantation (or in most other parts of my woods). That suits my purposes though.

I’ve had a notion for a while to swap out the steel fence posts I have among the pines with cedar posts. The experiment on Saturday proved that it could be done, and could be done relatively easily. Using the pole saw, I was able to cut the posts quickly. Now that I know I don’t need them as long, I think driving them into the ground will be easier. Removing the steel posts was simple. The only difficult part was strapping the thicker cedar posts to the fencing, and even that was hardly difficult.

The reason I want to do this because I worry about theft. Think about it. I have perhaps fifty steel fence posts resting in good soil at a remote site on the edge of the Missouri Ozarks, unsupervised for weeks at a time. With the cost of raw materials going up, the price for these posts has almost doubled since I first starting using them. I would not be surprised to come down to Roundrock some day and find that someone has yanked all of the steel posts out of the ground and driven off with them because they were sitting there unguarded. The pines would be unprotected, and given that the fencing is tied to the posts, the pines would probably get damaged as the interloper wrested the posts from the fencing. (Can you tell that I’m really good at these doom and gloom scenarios?)

So I thought that if I could swap out the steel posts for cedar ones, I could take away the “occasion of sin” so to speak. I can use the steel posts deeper in the forest where they are not going to be seen or among the pecans where once they go in the ground they will stay.

So Saturday’s work was a little experiment, and it seemed to work out just fine. Perhaps every time I go to Roundrock now, I’ll cut a few more posts.

Computer Update: As I write this, I still have no news on my laptop data recovery. I hope to hear about it this week. In the meantime, I’m thinking of making myself a laptop out of cedar posts. I’ll let you know how that works out.

Missouri calendar:

• The Missouri Natural Events Calendar is blank for today.

Today in Missouri history:

• On this date in 1870 a case was argued before the court in Warrensburg, Missouri about a dog, Old Drum. The team of attorneys that fought on the dog’s behalf included men who would become senators, governors, and federal judges. Such was the love for Old Drum. The team won damages for the killed dog, and the words spoken into the record have been applied to good dogs ever since. A statue of Old Drum stands on the courthouse grounds in Warrensburg.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 at 1:01 am and is filed under Stewardship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.