Fences.

Fences are for basically two things:  protecting animals from other animals, and protecting plants from animals.  For most of the last ten years I've kept animals of one sort or another.  We had ducks that were allowed to run amok during the day and got shut up at night, and we had sheep.  I suppose keeping the sheep from wandering in the road might be considered a third purpose.  Anyway, now we just have chickens.  Right now, the chickens have the run of the garden during the day and get closed up in the hen house at night.  During the summer that's going to have to change, because they'll destroy the garden, given a chance.  Properly channeled, that can be a useful thing, but not in areas where I'm actively trying to grow things.

I think I mentioned the initial tillage of the garden.  After that, I drove 8' posts about every 10' around the garden, and put up two layers of old wire sheep fencing, one over the other.  I tied the top of the lower and the bottom of the upper together, so it's more or less a solid woven wire fence 8' tall.  Because the 8' posts are driven in about 18", the top 18" of the fence is unsupported.  The idea was that deer would be the major pest to keep out.

I drove them in mostly with the homemade driver that the previous owner left behind.  Getting an 8' post started and driven and then pulling this thing off the top was sometimes tricky.  I once managed to drop it on my head when pulling it off a newly driven post.  I fell on the ground yelling and had to feel my skull to make sure it was still solid.  Luckily, my bones are very resistant to breakage.  Mental Note: Hard hats are a good idea when lifting this thing overhead.

We had already put up the early hoop house tunnel, and it became part of the fence.  The gate went right next to it, with the hoop house end acting as a gate post.  The gate is just a loose section of fence with a 2x4 put in the end vertically.  There's a hook in that 2x4 that attaches to the old hoop house end wall to close the gate.  This type of flexible gate is easy to put together, but over time the wires work back and forth and break.  So now, I also have two old cot size flat springs (marked USN on the side) that act as the gate.  The chickens are content to stay inside as long as they're closed.  I can slide or lift them out of the way to get the garden cart in and out.  I'd like to make a decent gate frame and use the flat springs as door-gates eventually.  Sometimes I think about cutting a foot gate opening into the fence somewhere along the north side too, to make it easy to go in and out without having to backtrack to the middle of the west side.

I didn't reinforce the corners when I put the fence up, and now they sag inward.  Porcupines have an easy time finding a way through sheep fence, and have turned out to be one of the most significant mammalian problems in the garden.  (There are rats around the hen house too, but fences won't solve that issue.)  At one point a new generation of poorly socialized ducks decided to leave and walked right out through the fence.  Clearly it wasn't good enough.

So I've been reinforcing it somewhat haphazardly with bits of fence and pallets and plywood from the transfer station.  There are still a couple places where it needs more, but I think I've got it mostly tight for the time being.  It just looks like hell.  There are now essentially two fences:  There's the original sheep fence to keep out deer, and there's the new cobbled layer outside that, about 4' tall, to keep out porcupines and keep in chickens.

The northeast corner has plywood and a pallet reinforcing it.  The east side has some 2"x4" welded wire down low, held to the old fence with the legs of old mattress platform frames.

 

The 2" Irrigation lines snakes through the fence half way along the east side.  All that grass grown up among the fence wire may look messy, but if I see a gap in the grass I know something is going through a hole.

 The southeast corner has a big piece of plywood and a large pallet to reinforce it.  There are a few bits of pipe driven in to hole these up.  I need to adjust things though because there's a porcupine width gap between the two, right in the corner.  It'd also be nice to pull that old corner fence post back to the new pipe post in the corner, just to straighten things up.

 The south side is a mix of pallets and old plywood from the demolition pile at the transfer station.  At each old fence post, a bit of angle iron from a mattress platform frame is driven in on the outside of the new layer, and the top is wired through the fence to the old fencepost.   Here and there there's a diagonal brace propped up.  This area outside the fence has asparagus planted, but really lousy weed control.

 The southwest corner is big pallets, with pipe driven into the ground.  I just moved some of these around.  There's one type of pallet that's 10' long and makes a very nice fence section.  They come from Viking Lumber's burn pile.  They originally had boxes of drip edge shipped on them.  As you round the corner, the old hoop house frame ends are standing, and the wood fence between them is made of these, with a few extra square pallets leaned up to brace things here and there.  There's also an old propane water heater and an empty propane tank from when we tried to heat water under a sand bed to get things started early in that hoophouse.  I really should clean that up.

 This box is made with 4x4 plywood and pallets, and is lined with old greenhouse plastic.  The whole thing should probably go, but at one time (before the plastic sprung a leek) this was a cistern to dip water out of when I needed to can water a newly seeded bed.  It had goldfish in it for several years too.  They'd survive the winter under the ice in the tank and eat mosquito larvae in the summer.   I'll pull this down, but I'll replace it with another much like it.  Behind it and to the right you can see one of the cot flat springs that acts as the current gate.

There have been other fences too.  When we bit off more than we could chew and tried to expand into a 2 acre garden to the east and northeast of this one, we surrounded it with a 3D deer fence.  There was one conductor about 30" up on one set of fiberglass rod posts, and then a second set holding two more conductors 3' to the inside of that first line.  One of those conductors was 48" up, and the other was 8" off the ground.  The idea was that deer don't like to jump distance, and the low conductor keeps them from crawling under.

It didn't stop porcupines though.  When I found a few dozen lettuces nibbled and a single porcupine quill among the damage, I put up yet another electric fence, 6" tall, all around that tempting target.

And the sheep were in electronet sheep fence, which is nice because it's so easy to move, but eventually they learned to jump it or push it over, and after 10 years a lot of it needed to be replaced, so I sold half the flock and put the other half in the freezer.

There are a couple of sections of poultrynet in the garden, which I used last summer to keep the chickens out of the growing areas.  I don't like the way weeds grow up through plastic net fences left the whole summer, and it wasn't electrified anyway.  I'm going to look for an alternative for next summer.