The Raccoon-Proof Fence (Insert Laughter Here)

It’s been a busy couple weeks here at the ScrapHound homestead. After waking up several mornings to find my newly planted, carefully nurtured seedlings traumatized by nocturnal visitors I bumped FENCE up to high priority, emergency level red. Or orange. Whatever the highest one is.

Our new lasagne bed was totally thrashed, thankfully before planting

Now, we think we can keep skunks out but we are not kidding ourselves that we can raccoon-proof a garden. We’ve had way too many people laugh and tell us horror stories when we suggested that. I believe one ‘friend’ actually snorted wine through her nose. As any gardener will tell you, raccoons can climb anything, and that’s only if they don’t just undo the gate latch and stroll right in.

We decided our best hope was to discourage them from coming into the garden by setting some boundaries. Literal boundaries, of course, as in fencing – we’re not hanging out trying to negotiate with a raccoon. That would be crazy.

The best part of this project is that we got to use a bunch of dumpster rescues we’ve been storing for ages, like these flooring sample display doors, an old security gate, and a decorative iron piece we found discarded at a neighbor’s house.

We decided to surround the four garden beds with 36″ high metal wire fencing. This is when it’s super handy to have a welding shop and a huge stash of salvaged metal on the premises! Jon cut up the security gate, cut pipe and rebar into posts and then we created some cute abstract flowers to put a little ScrapHound twist on things. Just because you have to fence in your garden doesn’t mean it has to be ugly, right? Jon made hinges and the gate started coming together.

Before installing the gate we had to build the fence. Jon set about pounding the posts in and I followed along attaching the fencing with wire.


Over the next several days we got the gardens enclosed, built a side gate for access from the back path…

moved the compost pile outside the fenced area and installed our colorful new gate…

… and celebrated with an ice cold Stella!

So far we haven’t had any unexpected visitors to the garden. They have dug through the new compost pile and snuck into the pallet box garden so we know they’ve been here and the garden has, thus far, been spared their wrath. Of course at this point the plants are only just starting to bloom so there’s no fruit to tempt them.

In fact, here’s my first tomato bloom and it’s a double!

Once the fruit comes in things might change, but we’re holding out hope that we can live in harmony with the furry creatures who were, after all, here long before we were. Hopefully if we keep the compost pile full of stinky food scraps the raccoon will have no reason to climb into the garden beds, but I’m checking out electric fencing just in case… just kidding! Mostly.

 

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