Building Fences

Garden Nbr. 02 was in need of better fencing. Deer roaming the neighborhood and nearby Connelly Creek Nature Area often wonder in, nibbling away on tender garden plants. The area is also full of rabbits so our fences need to be high enough to keep the deer from entering, and protective enough to keep the rabbits out. On my way to the gardens, my first stop was the hardware store where I purchased eight fence posts.

When I originally got this second garden plot (see last year's blog entry - More Garden Space), there was a wire fence running through the center of the space and around a portion of the perimiter. I took that fence down because I did not want it dividing my space like it was and to make it easier to clear the space of weeds, work the soil and build my raised beds. It looked like good wire fencing so hoping I would eventually find a use for it, I rolled it up and stowed it away in a corner of my garden. Now, more than a year later, I am finally getting around to building my fence.

The sun was shining, but ground still very water logged from the last several days of rain, so pushing the fence posts into the ground was not too difficult of a task. It would have been easier I am sure if my hammer would have been about twice its size when it came time to give those posts a few extra pounds in order to set them deep into the ground, but I did the best I could with the tools available in my garden tote. I also had some long bamboo poles and spaced them intermittently between the fence posts for additional support. Then I secured the wire fencing to the posts with the twine that I had saved from the bales of straw I had recently placed down in the walkways of my gardens. At that point, the fence was deer proof, but not rabbit proof as the holes in that wire fencing were large enough for rabbits to get through, so I still had one more issue to resolve. I had enough discarded fish net on hand to drape over the wire fencing and posts, so that was the final task to make my fence building project complete. 

It was so much more enjoyable to be working out in the gardens when the sun was shining rather than the constant drizzle of the last few days, and I left feeling confident that my garden would be safe from the nibbles of the neighborhood deer and rabbits.