Let me give you a little back story…7 years ago when we moved out to the “country” I never imagined we would be fencing a yard. I think we’ve all heard the famous quote from Robert Frost’s Poem, The Mending Wall, "Good fences make good neighbors.” But we don’t have neighbors. Well, we have one neighbor, about 1/4 mile down our private driveway, who happens to be my brother and sister-in-law. There are just our 2 homes on 140 acres. Pretty nice. Very private. Very quiet. (expect coyotes howling, owls hooting, geese squawking, birds chirping, turkeys gobbling…you get the idea) I guess I had always thought of a fence as a means of privacy. Well, now I know better.
Year one: Deer ate all my new hostas. And they were planted very close to the house, like right by our front door. So, year two: we decided to put up a 3-strand electric fence on the perimeter of most of the yard. I was bound and determined not to have our yard look like a fenced prison yard! At least the electric fence wire wasn’t too visible. Well, apparently deer don’t mind a little shock cause they crawled right under or jumped over. Year three: This is when I decided to put in a vegetable garden and there was no way all my hard work was gonna get eaten by deer. So we beefed things up with actual page wire fencing. A good friend of ours gave us a tip that deer won’t jump “through” a fence, like a circus animal through a hoop. So that meant we only have to go about 5 feet with page wire and then leave a gap and run the electric wire at a height most deer won’t jump. There’s varying information on how high a deer CAN jump but for the most part they’re not gonna bother with a 7 foot fence, unless they’re being chased by a coyote. So that seemed to work! But then I got lazy and figured we didn’t need to worrying about fencing the yard in the winter, after all there’s not much to eat. HAH! They chewed down the entire middle section of my Alaskan weeping cedars. Fortunately they have started to fill back in.
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| If you look close you can see how the deer ate the middle sections of both cedars. 2009. But I digress. The whole point of that lengthy back story was that we now finally have a proper man gate to enter the garden area. For over 2 years it has been a piece of page wire. At first I wanted time to think about what kind of gate I wanted…then “there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary solution” happened. Between rain storms and work days my handy husband has managed to make me a proper gate, a new (another!) raised garden bed and a garden work bench which cleverly disguises the propane tank…. AND all with recycled/reclaimed wood leftover from building the house and other odd projects over the years. And 2 pieces of wood he used have quite the history…he’s been holding on to them for years, way back when we lived in town. They had been used as planks to load a truck that was hauled over from Montana…(really big 2x10’s, 8ft long) and because he never throws ANYTHING away they were piled up with the rest of old lumber just waiting for a proper use. I love that all these little (big) projects utilized old wood with stories behind them… |
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| The two long boards were old planks that have been laying around for years…I started a purple hyacinth flowering vine that will cover this gate by mid summer. |
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| 2006, first phase of landscaping. |
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| Where's the propane tank? |
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| Start of gate without a man door, 2010. |
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| New gate today…not sure if i’ll keep the cow skull…:) |
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| summer 2005, just a few months after we moved in |
We’ve managed to solve the deer problem, for the most part. Our front yard isn’t fenced but i just don’t plant anything they like to eat, which isn’t much. They don’t eat ornamental grasses so that’s about the extent of plants on that side.
But the word is out in the animal kingdom…I just started see rabbits in my garden! Time for more fencing...
But the word is out in the animal kingdom…I just started see rabbits in my garden! Time for more fencing...
Excellent Jill!
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