DEER FENCE INSTALLATION: FINISHING TOUCHES 3

Preparation Early Steps: Posts and Fence Setup Middle Steps: Joins, Adjustments, and Supports Finishing Touches, Gates, and Maintenance Warning the Deer Away Anti-Jumping Insurance Fence Gates Access Gates Driveway Gates and Driveway Grates Dealing with Deer Paths Fence Maintenance

FINISHING TOUCHES, CONTINUED

Deer Fence Corners

Use suitable trees as the posts at deer fence corners wherever possible. Lacking trees, you need some sort of corner brace (item 15-06) or a heavy-duty earth anchor (item 16-11) with a cabling system. The cabling/earth anchor system (which can be used with any corner posts) is appealing, because all you have to do is to run a metal tie wire (a heavy metal wire coated for outdoor use) from the next post back over the top of your corner post (where it is secured with U-nails) or through a hole drilled in the corner post and on to the heavy-duty earth anchor, which is placed in the ground an appropriate distance away from the corner post (anywhere from 3 to 8 feet) and is postioned so that the entire length of the cable runs in a straight line. Doing this from both directions coming into the corner produces essentially a cross in which the earth anchors are located at the ends of adjacent arms. Besides bracing the corner post, this arrangement actually presses down on the post, thereby helping to secure it in the ground.

If there is no room to place earth anchors outside your deer fence, you may be tempted to try corner braces (item 15-06). These consist of two pipes, one placed along each of the two incoming sides of the fence These posts are both set into the ground so that they rise at about a 45 degree angle to a connector band on the corner post. Besides being unsightly (if the relevant deer fence corner is in the open or readily visible), this corner brace system has another drawback. For unless all three posts are set into concrete footings, it is very hard to make the corner post connections correctly, and the tension from the deer fence’s cable tends to make the risers act as the fulcrums of levers so as to destabilize, loosen, or even unearth the corner post. Thus, concrete footings are really required with corner braces, and since they are a lot of work to install, the earth anchor system really is a more efficient and better answer. These same points apply to the earth anchor cabling system as compared to the end brace system (item 15-07) sometimes applied at the end of a fence run.

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