Live life like someone left the gate open!

No matter who thinks it’s trendy to emblazon the saying, ‘Live life like someone left the gate open’, on T-shirts, wall hangings, mugs and various other merchandise, (I even came across a self-help book with that title), one thing’s for certain, farmers won’t think it’s trendy. “Shut the gate” or, as I heard it expressed recently, “Leave gates how you found them,” a heartfelt farmers’ commandment.

Luckily for us, we’ve always been on to it pretty fast on the occasions, admittedly few and far between, when anything from one to half a dozen of the neighbour’s steers have jumped a fence, walked along the road and come up our drive. (The roadside gate is one gate that, for convenience’s sake, we do leave open when we’re at home.)

It’ll be quite some time before we have permanent gates for all of our small paddocks. Gates that will be securely shut! We’ve had a severe gate deficit ever since (it’s several years ago now), we decided to get serious about rotational grazing and, as a consequence, crisscrossed our land with thin, white wires of temporary electric fencing. Severe permanent fence deficit as well – but that’s another story!

As of now, we have thirty-two gates that are quite permanent enough for our wee place. And twenty-five ‘gate substitute’ structures of varying degrees of novelty value that will one day be replaced by real gates whose usefulness will more than compensate for their lack of novelty.

I’ve decided, on behalf of my gated community of cows, that two strand electric tape gates made by the Gallagher electric fencing company will, in future, more than suffice to contain three head of cattle. The one exception will be a long chain link gate to replace the stretch of temporary electric fence that needs to be opened and closed to control the movement of cattle back and forth from the yards to the paddocks. The gateway is off to the side of the driveway and only a hop and a skip from the road: The temporary arrangement is a fiddly timewaster, and the idea of a substantial gate down there appeals to me both in terms of security and ease of use.

A 1.5 metre high gate will bring to a grinding halt the soaring ambitions of any goat; some of our gates are that high: essential, for example, at the billy goat’s perimeter fence. But June’s does have never exhibited any high jump hijinks so I can get away these days with installing 1.2 metre high gates in their paddocks.

I use wooden rails to make the gates: once you’ve got your lengths sorted out, making two or three at a time is pretty straightforward and a lot less expensive than buying them new. Must add the setting up of a gate production line to the never at risk of dwindling list of Little Owl Gullyish stuff needing urgent attention!

Good job I live life at Little Owl Gully like someone who left the gate shut!