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oklahomegrown

best fencing for raised bed?

9 years ago

i am new to living out 'in the country.' I have built a raised beds and I am wanting to keep the critters out. I am thinking something like this... https://raisedbeds.com/8x12-raised-cedar-garden-bed-deer-fence/ but I am wondering what to use... will simple netting do? or do I need something sturdier like chickenwire or hardware cloth. I would like to keep the costs down. I am a business owner and just paid my taxes. ouch.

critters I have seen directly, or evidence of, in my yard...deer, turkey, armadillo, neighbors dog, gophers, voles, moles, racoons, bunnies

Comments (2)

  • 9 years ago

    The raised bed and fencing you linked are beautiful, and total overkill, but I suspect you already know that.

    We live in the country, in a creek hollow very near the Red River and have every single kind of wildlife you can imagine living in OK, except for alligators, bears, elk and antelope. Our garden has been ravaged over the years by deer, bunnies, coons, skunks, possums, armadilloes, voles, etc. We'd had predators like coyotes, bobcats, foxes, coons (vicious killers of poultry and cats), ringtail cats and even an occasional cougar (very scary) prowling our land. Here's how we keep the garden safe:

    We have an 8' tall garden fence made with sturdy posts and woven wire fencing. Most creatures cannot scale an 8' tall fence. On the lower 2' of the woven wire fence, we have attached 1" chicken wire fencing to keep small animals like baby rabbits out of the garden. Even pretty large rabbits can slip through 2" chicken wire. The garden gates are sturdy and have sturdy latches to ensure the gates stay closed when you close them. Your fencing must be very tight against the ground to keep varmints from squeezing under. If the ground is very soft and they'll be able to dig under, you need to pour concrete along the fence line, or bury 6-8" of fencing underground. Oh, and you need at least two garden gates, preferably on opposite sides of the garden. This gives you an emergency exit if you look up and see a skunk, cougar, deer, coyote, bobcat, etc. at your open garden gate about to come into the garden with you. Better yet, train yourself to always, always, always close and latch the gate behind you when you go into the garden.

    If burrowing creatures like voles or gophers will be a problem, then when you build raised beds, you need to use hardware cloth to line them, stapling it to the sides of the raised beds. This will prevent burrowing varmints from coming up into your raised beds from beneath the ground and eating your plants, especially the root crops like carrots, beets, turnips, potatoes and sweet potatoes. We did not have a vole problem for about our first 10 or 12 years here, even though we had a prolific vole population all around us. Then the voles found our garden around 2011 or so. For a long time, we only had a 4' tall garden fence and often had bobcats in the garden. I suspect the bobcats were doing us a favor and keeping the voles under control so well that I didn't realize we had voles. After we raised the fence to 8' (because the deer were jumping over it), the bobcats became excluded from the garden and the voles became a problem, though only sporadically.

    Because all of our raised beds mostly were built before the voles became an issue, most of them do not have hardware cloth lining them. Once the voles became a problem, we built three double-height raised beds for root crops, lined with 1/4" hardware cloth, and we have not lost potatoes, sweet potatoes or carrots to voles since then. As far as I know, the voles never have bothered onions or garlic, so we don't have to row those in raised beds. If you grow sunchokes, voles are especially fond of them and they must be grown in hardware cloth-lined beds as well. I'd like to build a few more beds lined with hardware cloth, and any new bed we build is going to be lined with hardware cloth.

    Our garden is large and has evolved over time as the wildlife became more and more of an issue. I wish I knew in our first year here just how much of a problem the wildlife would be---I would have done a lot more pro-active wildlife exclusion from the very beginning instead of having to go back and do some retrofitting.

    I find it interesting that even though squirrels climb, they almost never have come into the fenced garden. Some people have massive issues with them. We don't. Keeping a birdbath filled with water will help prevent birds and squirrels from using tomatoes and melons as water sources.

    If you have groundhogs or feral hogs near your garden spot, I have no answers for them other than fencing the garden above and below ground with hog wire.

    Remember that you don't have to do it all at once. The garden we have now is not at all the same garden we started out with in 1999. We have made many changes as we have adapted to the lay of the land, the evolving weather, the continued growth of trees that threaten to shade out the garden, the evolving wildlife threat (which ebbs and flows from one year to the next), etc. We have changed the siting and direction of some of our raised beds over time, in order to make the use of drip irrigation more effective. Long linear beds that all run in the same direction are easier to irrigate efficiently with drip lines than a more potager style typle garden that has beds running in different directions. All our raised beds and rows now run east-west for ease of irrigation. Some of them once ran north-south.

    In our early years here, we had moles, gophers and voles. The cats quickly wiped out the moles and gophers, but since we have acres and acres of woodland, the pine voles always will be with us. The bunny population rises and falls depending on the coyote population. Deer are a huge problem in drought years, but not such a huge nuisance otherwise. However, they love garden plants and can destroy a whole garden in one night, so don't underestimate them. They might leave your garden completely alone for three years, and then one night jump the fence and eat the whole garden to the ground. For what it is worth, animal repellents are virtually worthless as the animals adapt to them, or just because rain and irrigation constantly washes them away and they must be reapplied often. All that has really worked for us is a good sturdy fence.

    Dawn


    oklahomegrown thanked Okiedawn OK Zone 7
  • 9 years ago

    We live in the city, but had to build a 4' chain link fence to keep the dog out of the beds. I still have a big rabbit inside the fenced area, but have been successful keeping him at bay, by stapling some plastic netting to stakes driven into the corners of the bed. They don't seem to have interest in the tomatoes, but they love the young pepper plants. Roots and leafy stuff is in front and I haven't had a problem there. Overall not a thing of beauty, but effecitive so far. Agree with Dawn, the repellents are not worth a flip.

    oklahomegrown thanked wotanhl
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