The Vegetable Garden

After I had two old spruce trees removed in the back yard, the pool equipment and air conditioning unit were eyesores. I wanted to camouflage them and I wanted a vegetable garden. We have a lot of deer in the neighborhood, so any vegetable garden requires a fence. I decided to install a wooden fence to both hide the equipment and keep unwanted visitors out of the garden.

I bought stock 6 foot dog-eared pickets and cut them to be pointed at 4 1/2 feet.

A white fence just seems natural for a garden, so I stained it with a solid color white stain. This is the first time I have stained the boards before I assembled the fence. I believe it was much faster than staining it after it was completed. The taller upright supports are for climbing flowers. A deer fence should be 8 feet. I thought I could trick the deer into thinking the fence is taller and have lovely vines growing on the supports.

When you make things yourself, you can add in any detail you can imagine and execute. In this case, a heart cut into the gate.

Heart Gate.

Andrew and I had a lot of fun planning the garden. We took the tops of the pickets I had cut and used wood burning tools to make our own artistic plant markers.

It was a lot of fun to draw the designs and lettering. We were competing against each other to see who could be more clever.
The plants have now grown too big to see any of this.

I wondered what to do with the old fence wood from around the pool. I posted it on Craigslist and a guy picked up all the rails. He told me the pickets were worthless – too old – I should just burn them. Instead, I used them to make wooden boardwalks in the garden.

Wooden boardwalk.

Building a fence can be a lot of work. The instantaneous change to the yard was worth the effort. The pool equipment was hidden and I could raise vegetables. The garden has given me so many vegetables I am giving them away to my neighbors.

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