The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Graduated fence to keep rabbits out

Using graduated fencing to keep rabbits out.

We decided to use this graduated 24 inch tall fencing for the bottom layer to keep rabbits from jumping through the bigger holes near the top.

The new plan is to add a 4 foot fence on top of the graduated fence and use 2 foot chicken wire on the very top 6 to 8 feet.

Cutting the job into smaller chunks will cost a little more in material costs but make the stretching of the fence easier on the two of us.



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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comment 1
Can’t they just dig under the fence?
Comment by Anonymous — Thu Jun 21 09:05:30 2018
Digging Under the Fence 
 Yeah, I saw the comment about digging under the fence.  From reading the blog, it seems deer are the apex vegetable predator right now; so that has to be dealt with first.

 Rabbits, moles, voles, etc... may need to have some buried fence line.
 What I did with mine was to dig a trench about eight inches deep and approximately the same width.  I took 18" chicken wire and bent the bottom to form an L shape with the horizontal portion pointing away from the garden.

 The idea is that when an animal comes to the fence, their instinct is to dig down to get around the obstacle.  After all that digging, they then encounter the bottom flange of the chicken wire and rather than dig "backwards" (as in away from the food source), they just give up.

 It is a ton of work to add this extra layer of protection; but once done, you have years and years of protection from all sorts of burrowing evil.
Comment by Anonymous — Thu Jun 21 11:04:04 2018
comment 3
Am I the only one who has issues with chipmunks? I have three, count'em three, layers of different sized wire fencing wrapping my garden. The chipmunks seem to be able to go through the smallest holes. They have eaten all my strawberries, and destroyed two beds of mature garlic by burrowing under the raised beds. I have taken to setting rat traps for them. I caught three, but the rest of them are avoiding the traps now like the plague.
Comment by Julie K Whitmore — Thu Jun 21 15:35:48 2018
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