One of the most important ingredients of a successful vegetable garden is a good fence. I speak from painful experience as my first vegetable plot didn't even have a bad fence, much less a good one. For the first ten years on Locust Hill I suffered the agonies of chickens scratching eagerly for grubs in my newly seeded rows and rabbits crunching merrily away on my Buttercrunch lettuce. Fat Mr. Woodchuck would invite his wife to a late dinner of fresh broccoli, and periodically the sheep, the llamas or the heifers would escape from their pastures and head straight for the vegetable garden, obviously craving a change in diet.
I felt so strongly about good fences that I had no trouble writing a song about them for my vegetable gardening program. It's much better when sung (to the tune of Rogers and Hammerstein's "There is Nothing Like a Dame") so I'll just give you one verse.
There is nothing like a fence
To keep the varmints out
One that's tightened up and tense
With posts that are strong and stout
It will keep out a chuck
And a rabbit with luck
It will scare off the deer
And the dogs who live near
And the kid who would like
To ride through on his bike
There ain't a garden plowed and rototilled
With beans and beets and broccoli filled
That don't need a store-boughten, four-foot
Galvanized, woven-wire fence!
Before we got around to putting that great galvanized fence around our little garden plot, I was always accompanied by my two constant companions, Joshua and Bog when I went up to pick the beans or weed the carrots. Josh was an aristocratic mutt we referred to as a sickle-tailed Egyptian Ibex hound. He spent his time guarding the planted rows for me and at the same time flattening the plants in them. Once settled down he was as hard to uproot as a dandelion, but he was a minor irritant compared to Bog, our Irish water spaniel.
Bog was a born retriever, so when I'd find a rock while hoeing and toss it onto the pile beyond the garden he would dash (usually through something young and tender) to the rock pile, locate the one I'd thrown and bring it proudly back to me. I learned to keep a bucket in which to gently place all rocks, but by then Bog had discovered that the rotary mower would throw rocks for him with regularity, provided he dropped them in its path.
Once we moved the vegetable garden from behind the barn down to the backyard we put in a good woven wire fence. It kept out the dogs, the woodchucks, the rabbits and all escaping farm animals. Because the garden was just beyond the back door, deer were never tempted to check out its offerings. Chipmunks were the only problem. They had no trouble getting through the fence. These adorable little creatures cease to be so adorable when they make a meal out of your strawberry patch, taking a bite from every single ripening berry just before it's ready to pick. Each night I would set out the Hav-a-heart trap, baiting with a fat glob of peanut better. In the morning I'd take each prisoner I'd caught up to the Norfolk cemetery - not to bury it, just to let it loose.
When I gave up growing strawberries the chipmunks no longer were interested in the garden and no animals bothered my vegetables for the next 30 years. Then last summer about a third of the garden became unusable while the new stone retaining wall was being built. We put up a temporary fence until the wall was finished, then Hank rebuilt the fence, using the new wall as its fourth side. Why in the world did we think this would be sufficient? Rumple, the young Puerto Rican mutt we'd acquired the previous year, immediately figured out that she could walk along the top of the retaining wall and jump down into the garden.
Apparently Rumple thought the vegetable plot made the perfect bathroom. She used it all winter and spring. Since she always did this in the dark of night, we were completely unaware that she'd chosen the garden as a lavatory, and when Hank rototilled in April he found it extremely well fertilized. We were never able to administer a timely punishment as we could never catch her in the act, so the problem continued for several weeks as we debated a good solution.
It was a complicated problem. Access to the garden from the top of the wall meant preventing Rumple from getting to the wall in the first place, which she could easily do from several directions. I looked into some sort of spray that would keep her off the wall, but no product lasted more than a minute if it rained. It seems like a shame to put a fence on the top of such a beautiful wall and constructing it would be extremely difficult.
Finally I got down a huge roll of yellow netting we'd been given years ago by the man who once sold us turf, attached it to the corner of the animal barn and stretched it down through the bank of rhododendrons to a tall post Hank put in at the corner of the garden. This temporary solution seems to be working, but I'm hoping Hank will come up with a better one soon.
