Putting up the Fence: My Garden Day 1

Getting up my garden fence. I’ve always hated the moniker of “weekend warrior” but we’ve all been there. A full time day job means I get only a couple of days a week to work on the house. Which is fine if its inside work but outside work means if the weather is crap then its just going to have to wait another week. Which is a real bummer when you need to plant your vegetable garden ASAP but you haven’t even built it yet! Such was my frustrations for the last couple of weeks of May into June. The weather was weird and WILD.

Around mid May we had a four day stint of nearly 100 degrees with 40mph winds and, of course, those were the days I had wanted to start building.

The first day of that crazy weather the wind hadn’t picked up quite that much yet so I basically bolted out there as early as I could.

I laid out my fence panels first to decide the best location. I wanted it centered in basically the foot print of where the barn used to be but several feet closer to the spigot or the “front” of the imagined rectangle inside my head.

(If my garden fence reminds you of a dog kennel its because it is.)

I ordered two three sided dog kennels from Menards. They each came with a gate and they were each 5 feet tall and 10×10 giving me a 10×20 foot space.

I ordered very very heavy duty plastic to put under the entire thing and I ordered enough of it that it layered four times over. Thankfully I had Lodi with me to get the plastic down or me and that plastic would of ended up another county over…

Yeah I know the plastic might seem like over kill but I just don’t want to have to mow in my garden lol. And I also know its really ugly but I do plan on covering with mulch or something at some point.

After that we started putting the fence panels up.

I’m no stranger to these types of fences. They come with really great steel clamps to put them together that are awesome.

However, they’re not awesome initially. Initially, while trying to get the panels up, they’re difficult, annoying, and very easy to lose by dropping a screw or a butterfly nut.

So I had about a thousand zip ties on hand for this project that I had no problem wasting $5 on.

They made putting these fence panels up a breeze. We lashed it all together with zip ties and then adjusted and shifted the entire thing as straight as we could manage.

Because this was where our old barn sat for over a hundred years (on top of several feet of concrete) we had a really lovely flat spot to work with which is exactly where the garden landed.

I certainly could have gotten this done by myself but it would have been a total pain in the butt.

The fence doesn’t have large enough gaps for me to be able to get a hand through which is great to help keep critters out but not so much if you need to be holding part of a clamp on both sides of the fence.

This is one of those projects where two people can cut the time down by a lot more than just half. One person on either side of the fence meant we could put all the clamps in easily and just work our way down.

And that was our day one.

We quit at that point (and the rest of those four hot days) because at that the point the wind was INSANE.

But I was still really happy!

It was still only mid May and usually we don’t get our vegetable gardens planted here until a week or two after that anyway so I wasn’t feeling too stressed yet.

More than anything though I was just really happy not to have that empty spot where our barn used to be anymore.

Around my vegetable garden I’m going to be planting a no mow “lawn” made up entirely of bee and butterfly friendly native plants. It won’t be a huge “meadow” initially but it will be a start and I’m very excited about that too!