I have some pine posts that I would like to use to put a fence around my garden area. Can anyone recommend what to treat the posts with that won’t leach anything toxic into the soil? This is a bit tangential to growing fruit so I hope this question is ok. Thanks.
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Linseed oil, or any oil for that matter. Some say a borax water solution helps too.
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Sorry to say, but pine is not a good wood for posts. Even treated pine wood we can get today is just so so. Anything you could put on the pine would just be a surface treatment. Metal T-posts are cheep and easy to install. Also, easy to move later.
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Charring will help if you really want to use wood posts.
eco wood treatment works great. in a silver-gray box. made in Canada. just mix with water . i built a 16in. raised bed with just fir which is worse than pine and treated the outside only with eco. it lasted 7 yrs. ill have to replace it this spring. id think charring then soaking the bottoms overnight in a bucket of eco would work well but like others said pine generally doesn’t last as long as say cedar which is what most folks around here use for fence posts.
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What is eco wood treatment made of? I visited their site to find out but they weren’t willing to list exactly what was in it
Thank you @KS_razerback @Paddy @steveb4 @horna for the responses. The area is fenced off with t-posts and wire fencing now. The idea is to make it look better with the pine posts. (The unit cost for the pine posts was less than the unit cost for t-posts of the same height.) In the future I will have to see what I can find for cedar posts.
I have the same question as horna about eco wood treatment.
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its a mix of minerals. guess they don’t want anyone to know their recipe. all i know is it works and its nontoxic.
Cedar wood is resistant to rot if you want to use that wood.
You can try coating with tung oil or linseed oil.
I want to build a small wood box for my plants using cedar wood fence planks, saw it online lol.
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It has been a minute since I did my research on this product, but my intention is to seal some treated fence posts with this product to decrease the likelihood of any chemicals leaching into my soil: Olympic - Rescue It 1 gal. Coffee Exterior Deck Resurfacer and Primer with Sealant
I don’t know just how nontoxic it is, just that it seemed like an effective product for my purposes.
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