The Equipment Required: Fence posts, Postcrete, Post hole digger, spirit levels, poke oke stick.
The Workers: Simon, Peter and Sarah
The Support Team : Kate
Progress Report:This weekend we were back on gardneing duties after 2 very enjoyable celebration weekends - the wedding of Emily and Rob and my Dad's 60th birthday. Far too much booze, food and fun.
During the week I went out to the local wood merchants to source fence posts and the wood for the path edging, which was delivered on Saturday morning.
Saturday was spent getting prepared, as my Dad was heading over on the Sunday to help us. Simon took delivery of the timber and moved it into the garden and garage. We looked in to hiring a post hole digger, but as they were only £22 in Wickes (and more than that to hire for a week), we ended up buying one. Its a rather cunning but simple contraption - basically two rounded shovel blades hinged together with long handles. It makes lovely round holes just large enough to house a 4x4" post. We also heard about a product called Postcrete, which is used unsurprisingly to concrete posts in place. Internet reviews suggested that this product was somewhere between alchemy and magic, so we bought what we though would be enough bags to cover all our posting requirements. It turns out we need more, but I'm not sure the car suspension could have coped with many more bags than we bought...
On Sunday before my Dad arrived we spent trying to get a level on the garden using the laser level, which was fun, but tricky whenever the Sun came out. Thankfully Dad turned up shortly after, and we started measuring out and then digging our first hole. I say we, I only ever did measuring and moral support while the boys did all the digging. Digging out the holes was slow going, and sometimes very slow thanks to a layer of rubble but steady, and getting the posts vertical and level on top took a fair amount of time, but the Postcrete turned out to be truly magic.
You fill your carfully measured and dug hole 1/3 full of water (we made up a special measuring stick for this), put in the post, make sure its nice and vertical and then pour in the powder. We found it best to have 2 people holding and making sure the post was vertical in both planes while one person poured the powder was best, but in theory could be a solo job. On a warm day like Sunday though we only had about 30 seconds to make sure we were level after all the concrete was in before it went so solid as to make moving it tricky. After 5 minutes the concrete was set fast. Chemistry - it's awesome.
By the time we broke for lunch (and the first half of England v France 6 Nations match) at 3pm we'd set 3 posts, and by sundown at 6:30 we'd done 5 - which is half of the posts that make up the pergola. Although the ground isn't level, we were able to check the tops were level with cunnning use of the edging planks placed on their cut side on top of the posts, which was a good measuring method, but I think got dropped on someone at least 5 times over the 2 days...
A sucessfull day, barring the disaster in the evening when the permanent marker my Dad left in his back pocket leaked all over our cream leather sofa...thank god for household insurance.
Monday, Simon was back to work, so Kate joined the working crew for the remaining 5 pergola poles. We got going abot 11:30, and by 3pm when Kate and I had to leave for an appointment, we had 3 posts in and the 2 remianing holes mostly dug. It was these last 2 holes - closest to the fence out to the parking area that were the worst. Our soil is clay, so tough to dig through to start with, but for these two the rubble layer about 20cm down was by far the worst we'd encountered. Whole bricks, chunks of concrete and tarmac for about 15cms. In the end the holes had to be widened so we could get a pickaxe in to break up and lever out the worst of it. Whilst we were out, Dad backfilled and redug the holes so that they weren't too large, and Simon made it home before dark to help him set in the posts in the concrete.
2 days, 10 posts. Not bad. We need another 7 posts to go in for the secondary fence, but these should be quicker as the positioning is not quite as vital as for the pergola - as long as they're vertical and in roughly the right place we'll be fine.
What it Looked like when we finished:
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