Today’s adventure deals with the garden project once again. Helpful hints received from many of you (thank you very much) included advice for dealing with produce munching vermin. I am collecting hair from our weekly haircuts for use in nylon stocking bags that will be hung on corner posts of the garden to ward off rabbits. We don’t have as many rabbits as we did a few years ago because Dolly Dawg developed a taste for hasenpfeffer on the hoof… or paw… and while it was heart rending to know she was devouring those cute little bunnies, the damage being done to our flower beds has been dramatically reduced. Perhaps fear of the “horrible, bunny eating beast of 1198” has spread for I have not seen hide nor hare of one for quite some time. But, just to be safe, I plan to hang enough hair bags to drive them out of this end of the county!
Maybe human hair bags will also help ward off raccoons, possums, and squirrels.
Oddly enough, the dogs don’t seem the least bit interested in squirrels. Personally, I think the squirrels bought them off by telling them where the road kill is before any other neighborhood dogs can get to it. They love possum though, live or flat. And they like coon as well, but rarely get any except when one get s hit by a car. They’re pretty ferocious when cornered, and not as stupid as possums. Possums will fall for anything!
While the dogs prove helpful in reducing the vermin population, they themselves pose a danger to the garden. Not that they’d eat anything – they HATE vegetables – but they like to dig. And they like to roll on Plants. Zadie couldn’t even wait for me to get the pepper plants Marie bought me in the ground before she flopped over and did her “back-dance” on them. They look like they’ll survive, but I was pretty ticked at her. Then there’s Boots, a neighborhood hooligan who pees on EVERYTHING. He’s done a good amount of damage to Marie’s flowers too. So I decided perhaps a small fence was in order.
I started this undertaking by toting out from behind the garage a roll of wire fencing and a pile of fence posts that were made available a couple years ago when Little Chelsea passed away and we no longer needed to fence in an area to keep her from wandering off, being old and addled as she was. I rolled the fencing out on the ground and measured it with a 100 foot tape. Then I strung the tape around the approximate area I expected to enclose and pegged it at the corners with small wooden stakes, adjusting the stake locations until I had used up the length of fence and it was pretty well squared up. Then I replaced the wooden corner pegs with fence posts and set about spacing the remaining posts along the sides.
I attached boards to each end of the fencing with staples after milling slots in the boards for a make-shift latch. More about that in a bit. I mounted one end at the front corner of the barn and began setting the fencing up along the posts. I wired a few in place at the top of the posts, but didn’t get all gung-ho about securing it until I was relatively sure the other end would end up meeting the back corner of the barn. Coming up 3’ short after securely wiring the fence to every post would prove very frustrating. Amazingly, I got it right the first time!
I left a “gate” at each end of the fence run. Gate is a pretty loose term here; it’s more like a flap of fence. The board fastens to the edge of the barn with turn-keys made of bent-over nails that fit through vertical slots in the board. Really low-brow stuff, but this is all an experiment right now. If it turns out that I am cursed with a black thumb and everything I plant dies, I can remove all of this in short order and put everything back as it was. Besides, the wire fence is fairly unobtrusive, in fact you have to look close to see it at all from across the yard.
Why fence such a big space? Mostly because that’s how much fence I had and I didn’t want to cut it up. But also, because if this DOES work out, I’ll be expanding my repertoire and I don’t want to be cobbling more fence in and moving posts. In the mean time, I can be using some of this empty space to compost copious amounts of grass clippings, wood chips and kitchen refuse. I’ll probably produce more compost than we will use, so I will happily share with the neighbors. Heck I might just start my own little composting service, “Bring me your rubbish, take come compost”.
Well, maybe not.
Another of the Helpful Hints I received was that we should consider adding chickens to the mix. If allowed to run through he garden they’ll eat bugs that would eat our plants and provide dropping that enrich the soil as well as providing us with organic eggs for our own use. That won’t happen this year, but it might later on, so having room inside the fence for a small coop would be good.
Just as I was finishing up, Tim brought me a Farm Warming gift – a rain gauge. So I cut a point on the end of a walnut post, drove that into the ground and mounted the gauge to the post. Thanks Tim!
While putting away the tools and supplies, I noticed that I had an audience. This fellow seemed particularly interested in my activities and wasn’t the least bit bashful about it. Perhaps he’s planning to hop over to the Garden Inn Park to see what’s for dinner some evening as well. Eat hearty Mr. Toad!
