Doesn’t have to be Hershel’s farm; any farm would work. And instead of fencing I’d go for a moat.
If you consider that you have nothing better to do – literally – than establish a safe home, then you could spend a summer and really do it up right. Find a backhoe to dig a serious moat, like ten feet deep. No water needed, as long as it’s steep enough.
Find a library and learn all you can about wind/water power. Set up windmills and a waterwheel if you can find a decent enough river. (Make this be your prime criterion when choosing a farm.)
Spend some time finding some serious weaponry. Fortify your farmstead. Get some animals, plant some crops.
Finding livestock is going to be pretty hard at this point. We’re now a year into the zombie apocalypse; any livestock from abandoned farms is either dead or gone feral. Mostly dead. Getting livestock from non-abandoned farms poses another set of challenges. Which raises the question; where is Woodbury getting it’s food from? Is it all in-town gardens and scavenged from supermarkets, or do they have some kind of farm setup? The latter would make much more sense, but there’s been no hint that it’s the case. Daily life in Woodbury is still a mystery.
Fine (though not really real world sensible since a single person could clear that yard safely in an hour based on the established zombie behavior we’ve seen to date), except that when clearing the yard was mentioned they didn’t say it was too risky to have somewhat give up their quiet chat inside the cell block while everybody else kept watch but rather that it would waste too many bullets.
Clearing the yard wouldn’t require a single bullet.
Of course, if they’d been making a practice of killing all the zombies near the fence every morning they wouldn’t have ended up with a hundred zombies int he yard the moment the fence was compromised.
Maybe the combination is the answer. They can’t go out in the open and melee the walkers for fear of being taken out by a sniper, and they don’t have enough ammo to clear them out safely from cover.
Not really related to this episode specifically, but thinking about the timeline made me realize that Carol went missing the day Judith was born, and was found the day they left for Woodbury. Later that day they tell Tyrese’s group that Judith is about a week old. So Carol was missing for 6 or 7 days? How is she alive? What’s the longest anyone’s survived without water? I know the general rule is 3 days.
The most frustrating thing about a Carol-Daryl relationship is there’s no real good collective name that works when spoken. Caryl or Darol work fine when written, but spoken it just sounds like Carol or Daryl only with a slight regional accent.
I love Norman Reedus on the Time Warner Cable commercial, btw.
“Daryl don’t shoot that thing in the house!”
“Yes ma’am.”
