We live very close to a mountain. So close, in fact, that deer wander our neighborhood. It’s a bit of an adrenaline rush to watch deer racing up your street and through the vacant lot at the top. So, on top of bugs and birds, we also have to protect our garden from the deer. They love to eat my tulips. Combine that with having two kids, and I am thoroughly deprived of their beauty. They, also, love to eat strawberry plants! Thankfully the few plants that were nibbled on recovered, but I wasn’t about to chance loosing twelve strawberry plants. So, we built protective barriers to put around our garden boxes. The instructions that we followed came from The New Square Foot Gardening book, and proved to be very simple and very light. We can move the barriers whenever we need to access the plants, and we can water right through them so that we aren’t constantly moving them.
To make them, we used 1″x2″x8′ boards, cut down to the sizes we needed, 1 1/2″ screws, 2′ wide chicken wire and 4′ wide chicken wire, a staple gun, and zip ties. For the strawberries, we needed a 2’x4′ cover, so we cut the boards accordingly and screwed them together. Then we stapled a 4’x4′ piece of chicken wire on one of the 4′ sides, and stapled a 2’x 8′ piece around the other three sides. We folded the 4’x4′ piece in half to form the top of the enclosure, and then zip tied all the edges together. Leah enjoyed handing us the zip ties, sometimes one at a time, and sometimes all at once.
We cut off the extra part of the zip ties, so they wouldn’t get in the way when gardening, and for aesthetics. And, we discovered that these make great baby traps. Even the trapped enjoyed playing in it.
