Wood Fence posts for the garden

[troutsqueezer]

I've had redwood posts in my garden for a number of years. They haven't rotted yet.

 

[jimmyj]

We use steel or untreated cedar. The cedar are almost 20 years old and still in good shape so I don't care if they eventually rot out. Better than chemicals in my soil! Steel is great though between the cedars, or put a steel post in and "face" it with a cedar post that doesn't actually go into the ground.

 

[crowbar032]

The other possibility is I have a bunch of black locust trees and I may cut them and get them milled into posts. Black Locust gets so hard it will outlast pressure treated wood in direct burial.
The old yankee farmers used to say it would last 3 days longer than stone.
Regards,
Chris

I'm 36, and there are some locust posts my Dad set on the back of the property around the time I was born. They're still there, but the fence is long rusted away. Once locust seasons out, good luck driving a fence staple into it. It's a lot of work, but if the diameter is too large, they can be split. I recently cut some locust trees that were too large for corner posts and split them. Cut them whatever lenght you want. You'll need a sharp wedge and start at the small end. Usually there is a visable split, put your wedge on the split. Drive the wedge in as far as it will go, once it cracks, you can use duller wedges down the length.

You can also use cedar which last a long time, but not as long as locust. It's also a lot easier to drive fence staples in.

 

[grnspot110]

If they're available in your area, get some Hedge (Osage Orange). They get hard as a rock & will last 50+ years! ~~ grnspot

 

[dmccarty]

Dan,
You don't want CCA anywhere near your veggies... the Arsenic leaches into the soil and it is inorganic arsenic. Organic arsenic your body will process over time and get rid of it.
Inorganic Arsenic is something that get trapped ino your body and it never leaves your body.
...
Regards,
Chris

Very little CCA leaches from the wood and what little does leach does not go far in the soil. To leach out of the wood, the wood and soil would have to be wet, and even then CCA just does not go very far, the plant roots would have to then take up the CCA for us to consume the chemical. I researched this years ago during the big CCA scare and the chance of me being poisoned by CCA PT is about zero. I built and used CCA PT for raised beds and nobody got sick. One day we will put up a proper fence around the garden and the posts will be .4 ACQ since I only want to build the fence once. I would use CCA without a worry if it was still sold locally.

The only reports I could find on anyone getting sick from CCA were people/animals eating the wood or burning the wood. DUH!. Other reports were very iffy if the CCA even was at fault. Even counting the iffy reports, there were danged few people reporting problems and this was on an anti CCA website. I would have expected thousands of reports but they had a few dozen.

The EPA report on banning CCA I read was sad to say the least. In that big long report they never said CCA WOULD or WILL hurt someone. They always used the words like MIGHT and COULD.

PT wood is used in the vast majority of wood frame houses that have been built for many decades.

In any case, while CCA is still available, it is hard to find and most PT wood is ACQ.

Your choices are simple. Use a PT wood for long life, use untreated wood that is not rot resistant, or use naturally rot resistant wood which is usually expensive. If you have local and cheap rot resistant wood you are lucky. We do not. My neighbor used Easter Red Ceder to build a small pole barn which is now falling down. He got a couple of decades out of the barn but now he has moved into a home and has to sell the house. That danged barn is a serious safety hazard and I can't believe they have not torn it down. The danged thing is leaning at a good angle and the liability is huge. If he had spent a few hundred dollars on the posts the barn would be in great shape and an asset to the property but since he went cheap and that barn will have to be taken down since it is a liability. It will cost them more to take that barn down that it would have cost to have bought PT wood in the first place...

Later,
Dan

 

[CliffordK]

Do you have forest service land around you?

It has been a while since I've done it, but around here the forest service charges something like $1 per post for personal use.
The only catch is that it has to be "down wood"... and you have to do a little work cutting, splitting, and dragging it out of the mountains.

Mom had a cousin in the forest service that would tell us where to look for down cedar.