It is important to fence your vegetable garden. Fencing a garden can be expensive. However, it is one time cost with multiple benefits: It could increase your garden space by 25% allowing you to grow vertically while keeping deer, bunnies, pets, and unsolicited people out.

My husband and I put posts and wires around the new garden. We rented U-Haul to carry the posts and welded wires from the community garden to our second property where we started a new food garden on the first Sunday of August. We couldn’t afford all the posts we needed right away. Therefore, I measured the garden and assumed 12 ft. space between the posts. Later we would purchase more to put one post between two posts to make it 6 ft. apart. We needed 17 posts 12 ft. apart. We took 25 posts from the community garden that we purchased two years ago and fenced our plots. We purchased 5 more at Lowes and added them in the van and dropped them all at the new location. We are going to have fence within fence to deter deer. The garden has a perimeter of 182 feet. That is about 2,070 square ft. The inside fence has a perimeter of 93 ft. The inside fence will be used for climbing plants which would increase our garden space by 25 % or more.

We used 6 ft. green steel farm fence T-posts and concrete wire 5 ft. tall.  On our second property, they are chain-link fence. We used some of our wires and some of the chain-link fence. While my husband pounded the posts in the ground, I planted Egyptian onion bulbils. I also spread sorrel seeds in some garden beds. A sorrel plant is growing in the new garden. However, something ate the leaves. Which is clear that I need to fence the garden. Bunny doesn’t eat sorrel in the unfenced kitchen garden at home so I don’t know what ate this one. There are rhubarb plants that grow well there. To pound the posts in the ground, we used a hammer. Then a neighbor gave us a post pounder. That helps us move fast. My husband suggested that we purchased one for ourselves. It was heavy for me to carry but it made it easy for my husband.

I purchased hay and spread it in the garden few weeks ago. Where I laid the hay, the grass broke down there. It is an easy way to start a garden on lawn without removing the sod. There are still areas with grass.

I would need more hay, wood chips, or fall leaves to cover these areas. I laid grass clippings on the garden beds to smother the grass. It worked. We spent 6 hours on August 10 to fence the garden. We are not down yet. We fenced the inside first with our 5 ft. tall concrete wire. We found 6 ft. tall chain-link fence on the property and used two of them to fence two sides of the outside of the garden.