Fencing in Harvest

A just-built Harvest lot is engineered ground: swales cut along the property lines to move stormwater, fill dirt still settling, topsoil thin over compacted clay. Two fence mistakes follow from ignoring that. First, posts set in a drainage swale sit in running water every storm — the fastest rot schedule available. Second, a solid fence built tight to grade across a swale becomes a dam, and now your backyard holds the neighborhood's runoff. We read the lot's drainage before we stake the line: sometimes the fence steps up an inch or two over the swale, sometimes the line shifts a foot, and sometimes the right answer is picket-style over solid for one stretch. Small adjustments, dry backyard. The posts underneath get the 24-inch clay-depth standard on every Harvest build — grading changes where the line runs, never how deep it goes.

That isn't just our preference; the county wrote it down. Madison County's subdivision regulations, in force since September 2017, require every new plat to carry a note that privacy fences, storage buildings, dog enclosures and other structures built inside a drainage easement are subject to removal at the owner's expense, and that swales and ditches be sodded and left to carry water. The county's right-of-way office adds that no structure goes in the county right-of-way or a public easement. So before a line is staked we pull the recorded plat, find the easement widths, and keep the fence out of them.

For most Harvest addresses the answer is the county, not a city hall. Harvest is unincorporated, so residential construction here answers to the Madison County Building and Fire Inspection Department on Shields Road, which enforces the 2018 International Residential Code with the county's own amendments. Whether a plain backyard fence needs a permit under those amendments is set by the county's residential-code resolution, and we confirm it for your parcel before dig day. The map is moving, though: Huntsville has been taking in parcels along Capshaw Road by owner petition, and an annexed address plays by city rules instead. For fences those are lighter — Huntsville requires no permit for a fence at all, though it bans barbed wire, razor wire and electric fencing in residential zones and keeps the sight triangle clear at corners. Madison stopped issuing fence permits in 2017 but still sets the limits in its zoning ordinance: eight feet in side and rear yards, 42 inches in a front yard.

Each community sets its own rules, and the organized ones publish them. Kelly Plantation, for one, issued architectural and covenant-enforcement guidelines in March 2024 that read like a checklist for the whole corridor: written approval from the architectural review committee before anything goes in; fences in rear and side yards only, never forward of the house; a six-foot maximum; treated wood in a shadowbox pattern with an arched top; and no chain link, vinyl-coated or wire fencing at all. Not every Harvest plat carries a covenant, and the ones that do don't all agree, so the first thing we ask for is the document itself. Whole phases close within months of each other out here, so the committees see identical requests in waves, and a submittal that looks like the last ten approvals sails. One exit farther up the corridor, Toney's newest plats are filling on the same timing.

Harvest's post holes are easy digging. The state's extension service maps Madison County's limestone valleys as Decatur and Dewey soils — red clay under a silt-loam cap, well drained, with limestone bedrock more than five feet down — so an auger reaches our full post depth without the shallow rock that complicates holes on the Owens Cross Roads side of the mountain. The same clay is why depth matters; a post set short in it leans by year three. Two more things are non-negotiable here. Alabama law requires an 811 locate request between two and ten working days before any digging, fence posts included, and that request is on us, not you. And north Alabama sits in the "very heavy" band of the residential code's termite map, so every wood post we set is rated for ground contact, and bottom rails are the first thing we probe on any fence that came with the house. Privacy pine in the pattern your covenant names is the volume choice, aluminum where a plat wants open sight lines, chain link only where nothing forbids it — the per-foot table prices all three. One last Harvest habit: new fill keeps settling for a couple of seasons, so our gates carry adjustable hardware and a first-year tune-up is part of every quote; a repair visit sorts an inherited fence that settled badly, and a measured quote puts a firm number on either answer.