As fun as they are to watch, bears will wreak havoc an anything! We've seen mirrors broke off our vehicles, bears on top of our SUV, bears on both our front & back porches, etc. We've got some darn big rocks here but a lot are softball to basketball size & moveable. That's how we got the trees in the ground. They were also bare root & it was a lot of work w/ ditch spades & digging bars... You'll laugh but my cages in this orchard are sitting on the ground & since I couldn't get Tposts or rebar in to secure them, I took rebar, cut them down to 6' lengths & laid 2 through the bottom of each cage, then put a lg. rock on each end of the rebars to anchor the cages. Works great but I've been pinching my fruit & wouldn't stand a chance of keeping bears out w/ this method once I let them produce.
I'm planning on my bottom wire at 8" high to solve the problem of bears crawling under, then wires every 8-10"? or so. Another big ticket ? I have is should I run all 5 strands as hot wires or alternate hot & ground wires? From my research, alternating is best when you've got soil that doesn't ground well but then they have to touch 2 adjacent wires to get shocked. Guess I could run multiple grounding rods but I'm leaning towards all 5 wires as hot. But not 100% sure if that's the right thing to do...
I'm a tree guy (arborist) so using logs is natural for me, messing w/ mortar & all these d*mn rocks up here prob. drive me nuts haha. Plus, I've got tons of logs right here, ready to be ripped down to length. I can grab them w/ my tractor grapple & move them exactly where I want them, drill them, & push the Tposts in w/ the FEL. Gonna try one & see how it works out & how it holds up w/ some pressure pushing & pulling on it....