Today was another quick day, with just a limited time spent in the garden. Most of the time was spent putting in another couple of posts for our new fence. A fence to keep the vegies in & the chickens out, without all the mess of mismatched odd bits of chook fence, an entire collection of assorted shapes & types of stakes holding it up all attached by bits of wire, cable ties & left over bits of string. I really would like to think I can have a vegetable garden & a neat back yard as well, and I'm hoping this fencing will form a great frame work for making that happen.
There was a lot of thought that went into the design of the new fence. It needed to be fairly cheap as money to spend on it was limited. It needed to be able to be adapted to allow the chook pen to still move in & out as we rotate it around the finished garden beds. It needed to look good as the finished product occupies a fair bit of our land space. And it needs to last a while. After a bit of of compromise we came up with the finished concept, and I'm really happy with it.
At first I wasn't keen on using treated wood for the framework and posts, but hardwood was going to be too expensive, quite heavy & not readily available nearby to purchase, and we couldn't really spare the extra to do a metal fence this time around. The design was based on our external fence, which is a Bunning's DIY job. It was great for giving us the feeling that the yard remained open, but kept the visiting children in, safe & sound. The new fence consists of panels in the same way, which can be bolted on or taken off fairly simply to allow easy access to bring the chook pen in. It's been fairly inexpensive with each panel being made up of just 3 180cm fence palings, one cut in half to form the sides & the other two used as the top & bottom railing. We then stapled the existing chook wire to the frame work. These panels are then attached to posts. The panels were aligned with the existing garden beds, and are just wide enough to allow the chook pen to fit through the gap when removed. Between the garden beds where there were existing trees instead of garden beds we've made a couple of fixed panels & also a couple of gates for easy access daily.
In addition to this I started to sort out all my old seedling and plant pots. To date I haven't used them for a while as I started to find it just as productive to plant most of the seeds directly into the gardens, but I may have another little project coming up & if all goes well I might just need these again.
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