Green Gardening Without Feeding Wild Animals

There’s nothing quite like a tomato sandwich with thick slices of tomato on your favorite bread with a slathering of mayonnaise on it. Add a little of your favorite seasoning, like some salt, and you’ve got a summer treat to die for. If the tomato is fresh out of your own garden, it’s even better. There’s nothing as fresh or tasty as veggies you grew and picked yourself.

If you’re in the mood for easy food ideas for dinner, they all taste better if you use your own vegetables. The only difficulty with gardens, and it’s a problem that’s been around since the Garden of Eden, is wild animals trying to get in and eat everything before you even get the first bite.

There’s nothing more frustrating than spending weeks of weeding, planting, watering, and tending, only to wake up one morning to find deer tracks all over your garden and all the shoots chewed down to the ground. Wild animals are great. They’re beautiful and majestic and graceful and peaceful, but they need to stay out of the garden!

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

Your grandparents or great-grandparents may have told you that good fences make good neighbors. This has never been truer than when it comes to wildlife invading your yard and garden, eating your flowers and crops. It’s hard to be green if deer keep eating all the green. You need a deer fence that will keep them out without hurting them. It also needs to be a fence that won’t be a blight on the landscape. After all, it’s equally hard to be green if you’ve got a big ugly fence surrounding your place, blocking the view and polluting everything.

What you need is a green fence. Not to put too fine a point on it, you need green deer fences that keep the deer out of the garden without despoiling nature.

Different Fences

There different kinds of deer fences. You can find the one that suitable for your needs. If all you have in your area are deer getting into your garden, then a standard poly deer fence will suffice. It has some give and stretchiness to it so deer won’t hurt themselves when they run into it, combined with a high tensile strength that will also keep them from breaking through it. It comes in lightweight rolls that are easy to handle, unroll, and install. You can get stakes for it or attach it to trees, either way, will work.

Best of all, once you get 15 feet or more away from it, the glossy black mesh is virtually invisible. You can see right through it as if it weren’t even there, allowing you to enjoy the natural beauty around you without having an ugly fence in the way.

Rodents and Other Gnawing Critters

Rats, rabbits, gophers, possums, and other small critters also like to get into your garden. They may be small but their numbers can make up for it and they’ll wind up doing as much damage to your crops as the deer. One of the ways to live a healthier life is to set goals and let them motivate you. A critter-free garden should be one of those goals.

A deer fence with an included rodent barrier has a steel wire mesh that has to be installed at the bottom of the poly deer fence. The steel mesh has smaller openings in it than the deer fence to keep unwanted critters from squeezing through it, and the wire material prevents them from chewing through it. The wire hurts their gums and discourages them. If you bury the bottom three or four inches of the wire fence in the ground it will also discourage them from trying to dig under it.

There are also fences with an angled top. The posts on those fences have extensions, and extra fencing material, to create an overhang. Animals can’t climb upside-down on the fencing so it prevents them from being able to scale the fence and get inside.

You can also get top mesh netting that goes over the garden to keep out birds. Sunlight and rain can get in but birds can’t. Of course, you’ll probably need to install a screen door along one side of the garden so you can get in and out yourself.

Good Fences Are Green

Good fences keep animals out of your beautiful garden without polluting the environment or hurting the animals when they encounter them. That’s a green win-win.