We Need a Fence

This is the main reason we need a fence. While it is rather thrilling to see deer in your yard, it is not so thrilling when you realize they have just devoured the plant you have been nursing along or even invited themselves onto the front porch for the better part of your potted fuscias. While many people just plan on a certain amount of deer browse, try to plant what deer don't like (they eat it anyway)or spray with anti-deer spray that makes you want to throw up, that just wouldn't work for me. Oh no, I had to have a fence around the whole yard. Jeff could build it, cound't he? Selfishly, I wanted to be able to plant something and find it in the same condition the next day.

We walked around the neighborhood and envied the many beautiful fences. The object was to keep the deer out, not create a privacy fence. We chose one we liked down on South Beach Drive. Jeff thought he could duplicate it. Our familiarity with the condition of our soil lead us to the decission to pay someone to install the fence posts. After talking to several people, we hired Heritage Fence to install 66 fence posts. It was money well spent.

We ordered the materials from Lumberman's. After much discussion, we went with the 10 foot posts. The posts were set 2-2 1/2 feet deep. The posts are treated lumber and the rest is cedar.

Our neighbor, Joe, threatened to come over one night and put large colored disks on the tops of the posts so they would look like lollipops.



After a few test panels so I could see and approve the design (I am very visual and no amount of explaining takes the place of actually seeing), Jeff created some jigs and tweeked the construction process so things moved along relatively rapidly. Of course, three new nail guns from Costco helped. Jeff started the fence in late August early September. The last big panel was done by the end of December. There is still one very small panel to do and the gates are almost done.

One more note - according to the experts, deer can jump a fence that is less than 8 feet tall. For various reasons, ours is only six feet tall. Will this be tall enough? Only time will tell. Our hope is that there is enough tasty food around that the deer will not bother expending the extra energy required to jump our fence. We have a contingency plan (add trellis where necessary) if we need one.