Garden Enclosure

After spending a week getting over a cold…or the flu…or some kind of bug…I finally got around to completing something on the farm. Yay!!  About time.

Our new chickens found the raised garden beds very exciting places to dig for things. And being chickens, they went at it like crazy. There was dirt flying everywhere, and the few remaining plants that were growing in the garden—cabbages—suffered accordingly. Well, I’m not going to blame them; both Chris and I decided to let them out of their coop into the tennis court and we’d worked out what the consequences would be.

Veggiemaggedon!!

So, this weekend I got busy. Fortunately the forecast rain didn’t happen and I was able to complete my mission; finish enclosing one garden bed.

Garden Enclosure

The panels down the side are not continuous; instead there are three panels with the middle overlapping the two end panels. The purpose is to allow a gardener to access the bed from the outside. The beds are 1.2m wide, which is too far for a regular person to comfortably reach to prepare, plant, prune, and pick. (How alliterative is that!)

The panels are held in place with a bent wire latch that catches on a bent nail. You can’t really see any in the picture above, but the latch also acts as a hook to hold the panel up once it’s opened (you hook it to the bird wire of the enclosure). Simple—as simple as it gets, really— but surprisingly effective and it’ll keep out the animals and birds that wanna eat our veggies, including determined chickens…although now I’ve said that, I assume one of them will find a way in.

Oddly, while I was putting wire onto the door, one of the chickens decided that she wanted to see what I was doing and jumped up onto the bench I was working on. Surprised the hell out of me, but she just cocked an eye and calmly walked about checking things. Only when I shifted the work on the bench did she decide she’d seen enough and jumped down and wandered off.

And the same chicken was determined to get into my garden shed while I was putting all the tools away. Determined she was! I had to actually shut the door, which of course meant no light into the shed, which meant I stepped on the rake, which naturally hit me.

In the head.

I felt like Sideshow Bob…