Good and Bad Fences

A blog has such a different format than my old website that it wasn't until this past week that I read all the nice comments various readers have  made.  Thank you all so much.  In future I will respond to them.

All that talk about gates in my last column got me thinking about fences and how important they are, especially around a vegetable garden.  Having grown vegetables without the protection of a fence for 12 years, I know just how much heartbreak it can eliminate.

My first vegetable garden was way up behind the barn, which meant chickens scratching eagerly for grubs in my newly seeded rows, rabbits crunching merrily on my Buttercrunch or fat Mr. Woodchuck inviting his wife to dine on fresh broccoli.  Periodically the sheep or the heifers would escape from their pastures and trample through the garden, but we’ve always been lucky that the deer do not bother us, probably because the dogs live outside.

I felt so strongly about good fences that I had no trouble writing a song about them (to the music of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “There is nothing like a Dame”) for one of my garden programs.

That’s the kind of fence we put around the vegetable garden when we moved it down to the backyard.  Planting the peas and cukes next to it meant they had something nice to climb, and made staking the tomato plant next to it much easier. It also elimintated the varmint problems.  Ooops, that’s not quite true.  When I grew strawberries in the vegetable garden, I had a real problem with chipmunks who adore strawberries and had no trouble getting over or through the fence.

I must have caught four or five of those little rascals in my Hav-a-Hart trap before I realized it was a hopeless solution.  I now grow my strawberries in a long row covered with netting just in back of a stone retaining wall which makes picking the ripe fruits a joy for someone with a bad back. 

I never raised strawberries in my first garden and don’t remember any chipmunks.  The most notable varmints back then were my dogs. Dogs are great companions and can’t really be considered varmints, but without a proper fence, ours were always lying down on the lettuce or searching through the rows for the rabbits they could smell. 

Hank’s Irish water spaniel, Bog, was the worst.  He loved radishes.  He’d go to the radish row, pull one up, set it between his paws and  consume it. I wish I had a picture of this crazy dog, foaming at the mouth from eating red hot radishes. 

Bog was a great retriever, so I had to be careful when preparing the soil for planting. If I found a rock and tossed it into the bushes near the garden, he would quickly find it and proudly bring them back to me.  That was bad enough, but when he discovered that if he put a rock in front of the lawn mower it would throw it for him I actually had to tie him up when I mowed the lawn.



Gottoo                          Clover

These are the two dogs I have now, Gottoo and Clover.  They often stand at the garden gate, obviously longing to join me while I’m working.  Clover is a rescue dog from Puerto Rico, a well-behaved lady who would probably just sit on the steps to the garden shed if I invited her in while I was planting or harvesting.  She never gives me any trouble. 

On the other hand, Gottoo is an incorrigible Basenji, who would cause infinite harm should I be stupid enough to leave the gate open.  Are you familiar with this breed of dog?  They’re as independent as a cat, cannot bark, but yodel when upset.  It was more than a year before Gottoo wagged her tail at me.  She has destroyed eye glasses, mail, pill bottles, in fact anything left within reach, and loves to tip over waste baskets and trash cans.



Apologies.  I guess I got waylaid from my subject, but I thought you’d rather see pictures of my dogs than pictures of fences.

Great Gates

                                      

Do you have a fence on your property? We have a lot of fences on Locust Hill.  The upper and lower sheep pastures are fenced, as well as the cow pasture and the vegetable garden. How to get over, under or through all those fences requires a variety of solutions.

The gate pictured above is two-sided so it is wide enough to accommodate a truck or tractor.  It has good hinges and opens and shuts with ease.  The other gates wide enough for a truck or tractor to go through are another matter.  We call them Texas gates.  A Texas gate is just a continuation of the barbed wire fence that encloses a pasture, its end post slipped through loops at top and bottom of the gate post.  It’s awkward and difficult to shut as the barbs get tangled together and the poles sag, making it hard to reach the loops. Much to my amusement, I recently discovered that in Texas this sloppy gate is known as a Yankee gate. In Maine it’s a Canuck gate, and in Bavaria a Prussian gate.  Obviously no one wants to take credit for this lazy man’s gate. 

The cow pasture is very large and its barbed wire fence has four different gates, but the section that stretches between our house and daughter Bridget’s cottage on the other side of the meadow has no gate, having been put up long before there was a need for one.  In the first few years after Bridget and John’s little house was built we crawled under this fence every time we went back and forth, all too often catching our rumps on a barb.

  

It took Hank a while, but he finally found the perfect way to solve this problem. From the old house foundation in the upper cow pasture, he found a large flat rock about a foot and a half high.  He maneuvered it onto the stone boat and dragged it over to the fence. Once he’d positioned it half way under the bottom barbwire, it became a stile.  Step up on the rock, swing a leg over the top strand of barb and step down on the other side.  Since grabbing hold of the wire could be nasty, Hank slit pieces of black plastic tubing and slipped them over the wires to make a pleasant handhold.





The gate to the vegetable garden is the one I really want to tell you about.  We call it the “No Wait Gate.”  I probably go through it twenty times a day in the summer, and even when I’m pulling the garden cart, carrying a bushel basket of compost, or balancing a grandchild on my hip, I can open and shut this gate with my foot.

The No Wait Gate consists of a light wooden frame 4 ½ feet wide and 3 feet high.  It has a diagonal support and is covered with light fencing.  Instead of hinges it has screw eyes, screws with circles at their ends. The gatepost has a matching pair of screw eyes, so that a piece of doweling can be slipped through the top and bottom pairs to create a loose hinge.  The lower pair are placed 3 inches above the ground so the gate hangs clear of the ground.  The gate is easily removed in the fall before snow can block it. 



The edge of the gate opposite the “hinged” side rests on the latch, a notched piece of wood rounded on the end and nailed to the fence post. Because the doweling hinge has enough “give,” it allows me to lift the gate up and over the notch with my foot to open the gate, or slide it over the rounded end to slip back into the notch when closing it.  “Look, Ma! No Hands”

Anyone could build the No Wait Gate, so I’ve tried to give you very clear directions.  Neither our dogs nor our sheep can figure out how to open it, but our grandchildren learned to lift it with their hands at about the same time that they learned how important it is to SHUT THE GATE, and how they delighted in slamming it.!





Seeing Red

The flag at the Blackberry River Inn 

It’s probably just because I’m getting to be too set in my ways, but I find it depressing how things have changed since I was a kid.  Because it’s about to be the 4^th of July, I’ve been thinking about the American flag.  I remember being taught that flying the flag wasn’t allowed in bad weather or after sunset.  When we were given the privilege of raising the flag at school we made sure it didn’t get dirty, wet or even touch the ground.

I guess once folks started burning the flag, all these ideas became obsolete, like ladies wearing hats in church or men dressing in a coat and tie at a cocktail party.  Nowadays I see the Stars and Stripes day and night, rain or shine.  I’m not being critical, just making a comment.  The only flag on Locust Hill is in the attic, has 38 stars and is probably full of moth holes.

I can remember when I was around eight or nine our class planted a flower bed that stunned us the following spring by bursting forth as the American flag – seven rows of red tulips interspersed with six rows of white ones and a blue square of I can’t remember what, probably scilla, with white stars.

I’m not so patriotic that I’d contemplate planting such a flower bed, any more than I’d overpay my taxes to help reduce the national debt.  Red, white and blue is a great color scheme for flags and 4^th of July parades, little girls’ dresses and little boys bedspreads.

Red, by itself, is a very strong color so an all-red garden is almost too overpowering to consider.  I’d better add, in my opinion, since beds of red cannas or salvias are very popular. I prefer to use this hue more sparingly.  A single splash of crimson in the garden will catch the eye the same way a pretty girl just home from the Caribbean will sparkle at a winter cocktail party in New England.  If all the guests sported that same gorgeous tan instead of looking white and pallid, she might not stand out.  Too much of anything ceases to be an eye-catcher.

Most annuals are available in red, but both seeds and seedlings are usually sold in mixed colors.  Perennials are easier to find labeled by color, and because they bloom for a limited time, they focus attention on different parts of the garden each month. 

I"m more fond of pinks and blues and have very little red in my garden, but one perennial I particularly like is the blood red Russell lupine. Even when the nurseries don’t label their lupines as to color, you can tell the red by its leaves, which are much darker than those of the pinks, blues and whites.  Unfortunately my red lupines are past their prime so I went over the the Freund's Nursery for a photo.  This is Celosia, also known by its more common name, cockscomb.  It comes in yellow as well as red, a tender annual and easy to grow from seed.

The campions (Lychnis) which bloom in July, are  a nicely contained perennial standing two to three feet high with attractive foliage and large, rounded clusters of fire-engine red flowers.  You may know them as soldiers on the green or scarlet lightning.

Another July bloomer is Monarda, more commonly called beebalm. Its shaggy Raggedy Ann flowers attract hummingbirds, who shimmer and hum over the bright red petals, slurping up the sweet nectar. That’s the best thing about red flowers. Hummingbirds are addicted to them.  These tiny birds are such a treat to watch that even if you're like me and aren't fond of red flowers, you should grow a few just for that reason. 

Have a happy 4^th of July, and be kind to your flag.