I woke up this morning to find many signs of critters in my garden, one of which had to be shoveled up. Sadly a couple of pea shoots and daikon seedlings were lost to the invasion.

We’ve lived in this house for a long time, so I have a lot of materials hanging around that can be used to make a defensible perimeter. Given that what I have around is hog-wire fencing and metal fence posts, my garden is going to look more like a prison than Pinterest, but a girl can dream right? Damn right I can!

A quick google search turns up gardens filled with the most beautiful obelisks and trellises for training vining crops like peas and beans. I like to imagine that the people who designed these gardens have lovingly assembled all of their functional garden art through years of splurges and birthday presents (ahem. Hint hint.) They don’t come cheap, and if they did, I wouldn’t rely on them to support anything but the lightest crops. On the other hand, if they’re sturdy enough, they can be used to support heavier plants like tomatoes and squash, raising them up to leave more precious garden space beneath them.

I can picture using a row of these trellises or an assortment of carefully arranged obelisks to defend the north side of my garden from inquisitive doggos.

Generally, northern hemisphere gardeners place their tallest plants on the north side of the garden so that they don’t shade lower growing plants.

But what I have lying around is, again, hog wire and fence posts. I might arrange them into panels to reduce that ‘outer perimeter of San Quentin’ vibe, but it’ll depend on how many fence posts I can scare up.

I still have three other sides of my garden to defend, and two sides are a little challenging because they’re backed by a retaining wall. It’s like working at a three foot high raised bed when I’m standing on the path below the wall (we call it the hoho for all you Terry Pratchet lovers out there). If I put a fence along the top of that wall, I wouldn’t be able to reach over it.

I have read that it can be helpful to have a horizontal supports above your garden bed to keep top-heavy flowers and plants from flopping open as they develop. A bonus, is that I can’t picture my pets carefully lifting their paws into these things to get into the middle of any plant staked up this way.

But again, what I have is hog wire panels, So I think I’ll go ahead and set up an 8-3 foot section of the stuff using fence stakes to float it over the veggie beds. That should defend that side pretty well, but I’ll still want to see it in action.

Finally, for front side of the garden, visible from the kitchen window, I’d love to have little decorative fence with maybe an arbor arch and a gate. I love this decorative fence with the little curly vines. It’s probably just pokey enough at the top that my dog wouldn’t risk his delicate doggy-man parts by hopping it, but we’d need to test that.

What I’m actually going to use, is, wait for it… a puppy yard fence. Ha! Bet you thought I was going to say hog wire! (Okay, there might be some of that too).

And for the gate, I love this this one with it’s oversized cartoony flowers. So fun!

My doggie play yard is hinged, so that’s kind of like a gate, right?

Okay, I might splurge on this flower arbor. Maybe it’ll be my my first piece of garden art.