Best fence ideas in your home garden

 Choose the best garden fence

Most gardeners eventually have hot encounters with unwanted wildlife. The best and kindest solution is to get rid of them with the right kind of barrier. A good farm dog can be a great help, and repellents and scare devices sometimes work for some animals, but you can not beat well-selected garden fences for reliable long-term, 24-hour protection.

Assessing your needs

While the primary purpose of the fence is to prevent animal pests, you can not choose the best garden fence until you know what they are. The eight most common wildlife pests in the gardens (alphabetically) are deer, porcupines (woodpeckers), pocket gophers, rabbits, raccoons, skunks, squirrels, and walruses. Note that this list does not include opossums and moles. Neither species directly damages garden crops, and both feed adequately on pests.

To help you identify which animal (or animal) is naughty in your garden, do you match the evidence you see with descriptions of the damage in who is raiding your garden? Most animals leave a kind of symptom - footprints, traces of teeth, decay, or the way they dig in search of food. Check with your local extension service to find out what animals are known to damage vegetable gardens in your area.

You can often see the damage caused by birds, squirrels, or land pigs during the day, but night shifts can be difficult to keep track of. If you can not figure out which organisms are causing the damage, install a $ 10 worth of wireless motion sensor lamp in your garden and then turn off most of the lights in your home. The first few times the light comes on it can scare the animals, but after that, if they accept it, it means getting a good meal. Hold the telescope in your hand to see your new opponent better.

Temporary pop-ups against the permanent circumference

Do you need to fence your entire garden or do you just need protection for certain crops? If your only problem is protecting the strawberries from birds and squirrels, creating a protective cover for a bed using chicken wire, row cover or both is much less work than setting up a fence. Raccoons after your sweet corn is another problem that can be dealt with on a small scale, with a two-fiber electric fence carefully positioned so that one fiber is 6 inches above the ground and the other 12 inches high. See Electric Fence for a full report on your electric fence options.

If you want to exclude chickens and other pets, if the deer is a serious problem, or if you are struggling with regional creatures such as pocket cobras and ground hawks, you may need a perimeter fence. Plastic mesh fencing may be a cheaper option to deter deer, but be aware that rabbits can quickly bite through plastic, creating openings for small creatures. If you have anti-rot trees like cedar, grasshopper, mulberry, or Osage Orange, you can cut down some of the posts you need from your own land. In places where appearance is important, you can create an attractive wooden fence and line its base and the floor around it with a chicken net (chicken wire) or hardware cloth. Can prevent animals from going inside. This extra feature is essential. Any fence should exclude rabbits, pocket gophers, and other small animals with sharp teeth.

In many home gardens, the garden fence also restricts the movement of sheep, dogs, pigs, or chickens, so many start with a perimeter fence behind the wires and then add chicken nets or electric fences to increase the fence's pest repellents. Properties. For the main fence, there are three economic choices:

Woven wire fence

Must be stretched forcibly between firm posts, so secure bracing is required for edges and corners. On the positive side, woven wire flexibility makes it more resilient and easier to install on uneven terrain than other types of fences.

Welded wire fence

It is harder than woven wire and requires minimal stretching, so it is easier to install compared to woven wire (and requires less deeply set reinforced posts). Welded wire performs better on relatively even ground. Welded wire products with small mesh at the bottom edge (to keep horses from catching their hoofs) Prevent.

Stock panels

Solid fencing panels are sold in standard 16-foot lengths. They range in price from $ 20 (for a 34-inch high panel) to $ 45 (for a 5-foot high panel). Installation is as simple as attaching them to metal posts with clips - no extension required. And they are easy to replace if needed.

Multi critter protection

These basic fences require additional features before they can act as a barrier to any small animal pests. To avoid pocket coffees, ground hawks, rabbits, and skunks, you will also need a barrier buried by a burning chicken net or hardware cloth outside the bottom of the fence. How deep the buried edge should be will vary depending on the digging capacity of the organism. To prevent rabbits if you only need to, you can secure the burned area to the ground. Better diggers like ground hawks and pocket copers often require deeper prevention.

If you have never handled chicken net or hardware "cloth" (made of metal), give yourself time to find out which materials are most suitable for your needs. Buy small rolls to test before choosing a fencing product for a larger project. You will need gloves and pieces of wire strong enough to cut your favorite fence. If you are working alone, you need to have safe weights (stones, bricks, dirty buckets) to hold the fence to the ground when spreading and bending the fence flat.

Deer fence

We may have been discussing deer prevention for hours, including other methods of fencing (such as raising cats and daffodils in deer access paths or hanging dirty dog ​​blankets from trees). But when you get the final solution - a useful fence - set aside the idea that you may be tall. Height certainly helps, but depth (like two fences) can be a major factor. Deer are excellent jumpers, but their deepest concept is bad. Here are two ways to create a three-dimensional fence to stay out of your garden.

If you already have a fence, it will not block the deer, but your children play there, so if you do not want to go on the electricity, you can install a second fence 3 feet inside the outer fence. Two fences - one inside and the other - prevent deer from jumping due to their shallow depth.

When deer pressure is severe and losses are not tolerated (such as new orchards), deer can be effectively prevented by a 3-D electric fence. You can use a strand-type electric fence if you wish, but it is still better (and cheaper) to use electricity because deer are easier to see. You will need at least three lines: two of which form the inner fence (approximately 2 and 4 feet from the ground, slightly varying depending on the size of the local deer), and the third the hotline (approximately 3 feet from the ground). The outer fence is 3 feet from the inside. Most deer come out after being stabbed when they eat grass and weeds under a single-fiber outer fence. If they try to jump on the basis of the inner fence, which is important for vision, their hind legs will be attached to the outer fence before they leave the ground - an important detail for a successful job. This electric fence can be very easily connected as a wire fence.

Not everyone wants to use electric shock to attract the attention of animals, but sometimes tough choices have to be made. When you install a critter-proof fence, you can quietly separate your food garden and local wildlife.