Cages and Fences

What makes a farm look like a farm? Is it a big red barn? Is it a flock of sheep, a herd of cows, a row of corn? In my opinion, it's the fences. Fences show that you mean business. We have fences now-- does that mean we're official?

Fence #1: The Garden Fence

Vegetables are delicious. I want to eat them. You want to eat them. The deer want to eat them. With all these vegetable seeds and seedlings in the ground, it was time to start keeping the deer out. See the fence in the photo at the top? It looks like it's just vertical pieces of wood, but there is super lightweight deer netting strung from post to post with a wire at the top for extra support.

Pounding eight foot tall wood poles into the ground sure is fun when you're just over five feet-- I'm sure I looked pretty funny on a ladder with a post pounder in the middle of a field. Dee and Ryan helped hang the netting, and Ryan rigged a gate that hopefully will do the trick. It doesn't look like much, but it's something for the deer to hit their noses against and think twice about jumping.

Fence #2: The Chicken Fence

After the deer, what were the second most pesky animals in our garden?

Chickens. Yes, our very own, beloved, egg-laying chickens.

Chickens like to scratch. They like to make dust baths. They poop everywhere. They eat tender young greens. In short, they are a menace to the vegetable garden and any low-lying landscaping. It was time to put an end to their reign of terror.

Here is a recipe for a chicken fence for the amateur fence builder:

6-ft T posts, enough for 10-ft spacing around your perimeter
One post pounder
4-ft welded wire fencing to the length of your perimeter
A whole bunch of UV-resistant zip ties
A gate that Em found on the side of the road
One 4x4 post that's a bit too long
Time
Ryan
Carabiner(s)

First, measure our your perimeter and pound in posts at each corner and at approx. every ten feet between the corners. Then, begin to secure your welded wire fencing to the T posts using the zip ties, trying to get the tension tight enough for the wire to stand up fairly straight between the posts. A tensioner would be helpful here, if you have one. Stare at your second-hand gate until you figure out how you're going to use it, attach it, etc. Send Ryan to the store for supplies accordingly. Walk away and let Ryan install the 4x4 post and the gate. Tip: Carabiners can be very helpful for latching gates open/closed.

Run an extra wire around the top if you notice that the friskier hens are escaping, as ours did. Luckily, chickens don't jump as high as deer do, especially if you have the chunky "dual-purpose" hens that are so popular on homesteads these days.

To top it all off, they actually have two separate pastures in there, so we can do a bit of rotational grazing just like the books say you should.

Cages #1 and #2: The Rabbits

(Okay, they're not fences, but they are enclosures. I think it's close enough.)

Readers, I have a confession to make: I discovered that I like eating meat.

If you have known me for very long, this may come as a shock. For those of you who are new, let me just say that I've been vegan or vegetarian since 2006, with a few exceptions here and there for studying abroad and similar occasions.

My choice to be vegetarian/vegan was based mostly in environmental reasons. The meat industry is huge, environmentally irresponsible, and downright gross. The dairy and egg industries aren't much better. Although there are groovier options out there, the labeling is often misleading and the prices are high. And, honestly, buying shrink-wrapped flesh gives me the heebie jeebies.

And so I decided to raise our own. I decided to raise rabbits. I plan to write a post expounding on the virtues of rabbits as a meat animal, but for now, suffice it to say that rabbits make a lot of meat with little input. For this, you need rabbits bred to be meat producers-- none of those adorable dwarf varieties or perky, active pets. No, you need rabbits that were bred to be little bricks, rabbits that will eat their food and then hunker down and convert calories into pounds.

As of today, I have two rabbits. I am hesitant to name them, so for now I'll call them what Mini does: Brown Bunny and Black Bunny. I bet you can tell which is which. They're both females, or does. Brown Bunny is a Rex/Chinchilla mix, and she won't be ready to breed for another couple months. Black Bunny is an adult Silver Fox, a heritage meat breed that also has beautiful pelts. Black Bunny spent some time with a male rabbit yesterday, and I'm hoping for little black kits in about a month.

Ryan has promised to build a real shed for them, but for now their cages are housed in a hand-me-down greenhouse I got from a crazy woman on Craigslist. There's always something build around here. Fences, sheds, decks, community...