LOOKING FOR A BETTER VIEW

There is plenty of work to be done in the garden at this time of year. Every thing I can do before the garden is put to bed for the winter is one less thing to do come spring. And of course there are other tasks that simply must be done in fall, like planting bulbs.

Still it is difficult to keep from thinking about projects for next year. I can't be responsible for whatever kind of insanity I might come up with in January (this seems to be when the spark for new garden is ignited), but I have had two ideas rolling around in my head since the middle of summer or longer.

One of them deals with the edge of our property on the far side of the driveway. Our house is pretty secluded and from almost every angle the views are at least broken up, if not blocked, by trees. That's probably why I'm hypersensitive to areas that feel too open to me, and this is one of them. There is a large gap in the mature trees (at eye level, anyway) on that side of the property, opening up the view to our three neighbors down the road. And to my eye, anyway, it's not pretty.

There's a lot of stuff sort of cluttering up the view in this direction.

There are boats of various levels of usage (some frequently and others that have not seen water in the dozen years we've lived here), RVs, trailers, sheds and lots and lots of cars. And for cars or people coming from that end of the road, it's a clear view straight into our patio and front door. For a person who routinely gardens in her pajamas (you know how this goes: You grab a cup of coffee and go outside, see one weed and 45 minutes later you have pajama pants with muddy knees), this is not optimal.

Growing something there would be great, but because of a very large maple, it's a very difficult location for much of anything to grow. Several years ago I planted five viburnums there but they've not really thrived or accomplished what I put them there to do.

The viburnums I planted several years ago have not fulfilled their mission.

So I've been toying with the idea of putting a decorative fence—not something that would completely block the view, but enough to distract the eye—along a portion of the open area. I would start it at the end of a large stand of cedar trees and continue it into a woodsy area toward the end of the driveway. A chunk of fence is a bit odd perhaps, but it's the best I have at this point.

The fence I'm thinking of would start at the last cedar tree on the left and continue past the right side of the photo. The viburnums would either be composted or moved.

Before I jump into anything I might do a little playing around with it on Photoshop to get a feel for what it might look like.

What about you; are you already thinking about projects for next summer?

BATTLING THE DESTROYERS OF (MY) UNIVERSE

One of my favorite things to do on a warm summer morning is take my cup of coffee and stroll around the garden. Most of the time I end up with dirty fingernails and a half hour late for work after I start pulling random weeds or deadheading spent blooms.

But lately my walks have been anything but a relaxing start to the day. Instead of admiring the morning dew on flowers, or picking an errant weed, I end up surveying the damage. And it is plentiful.

The deer population here has apparently flourished and from what I can tell, a good number of them are hanging out in my yard every night. Living a quarter mile from a state park, deer are a fact of life here. But until last winter, I was able to manage their impact in the yard with a little bit of smart planting and a variety of deer repellant methods. When we sustained horrible deer damage last winter, I wrote it off as a side effect of a winter with snow that never melted an a lack of food for the herd. The problem is, the damage never stopped.

You would be hard pressed to find an intact hosta in my yard. The few that the deer are not interested in appear to be very tasty to slugs. The hydrangeas are under constant assault. The sedums have been sheared off so many times I've lost count. Lily buds are nipped off every night. Roses are reduced to nibs. Even nasturtiums are sampled.

Deer hoof prints in the garden (near a nibbled on kale seedling).

Disfigured hosta.

An Annabelle hydrangea with few buds left.

Random lily buds nipped off.

A poor gingko that has had to be caged its whole life.

Sheared off sedums.

The options for deterring deer are not many. There are a ton things that are said to work, and most do for a short time. Human hair (never tried), Irish Spring soap (didn't work), blood meal (didn't work), Milorganite (repels humans too), predator urine (gross, stinky and doesn't really work), commercial spray deterrents (work for about a week), garlic spray/capsules (the deer laugh), big dogs (the deer laugh harder).

The one thing I've found to work a little bit (and I actually found a study to support this) is an egg-based spray. Here's the recipe I use.

So almost every night, I go outside sprinkling this stuff on my plants. I pretty much always get some on myself (yuck) and if it rains at all, it's gone. Any plant that I miss is fair game.

I'm sick of spending my time doing that. I'm sick of having a garden that looks half as good (or less) than it should because so many plants have been destroyed. I'm sick of having to consider if a plant is particularly tasty to deer when I shop for plants.

It's clear there is only one way to stop this from happening. The only truly effective way to keep deer from eating your garden is to keep them out of it all together. In other words: a fence.

I'm not alone in my quest to have a garden that is not eaten by deer. Margaret Roach tried it all before she put up a fence.

I bristle at the thought of a fence and can think of many reasons why I don't want one: they are expensive, they can be ugly, they are a pain to mow around and keep looking nice, they require something (a gate, most likely) at the end of the driveway and, for me the worst bit of all, they send a message to your neighbors that can be perceived as unfriendly. I love our neighborhood full of eclectic folks, where many of us have large properties but there is always a friendly wave or a chat to be had on a walk down our shared road. Fences have no part in that, in my mind.

In fact, our very loose homeowners association once had some rules about fences, although now that I've lived here long enough I seriously question whether anyone would actually say something if you put one up. I do know that when we considered it several years ago, our next door neighbor begged us not to put up a fence. And I completely understood his position.

From the research I've done on deer fencing so far, there are two options that seem to work. You can either go tall—at least 7 feet and some places say 8 feet—or you can go wide. Two 4-foot-tall fences 5-feet apart are said to work because deer won't jump into an enclosed space and they can't jump high and long. The tall version is most certainly more economical because you can use sturdy plastic mesh fencing, although apparently it works best when you run a tension wire through the middle of it because otherwise deer will lean on it until it gives.

Masterfences.com photo

Short, double fences to keep out deer. Marthastewart.com photo

 A pair of shorter fences would certainly be more attractive, but the cost to build a nice looking fence could be astronomical. And I keep thinking about what you're supposed to do with the area between the two fences (I have visions of weeds taking over). If we lived on a truly large property, the double fence idea would be great. You could put up a pretty simple cattle-type fence, mow a path through the middle and call it a running track.

Our property is large enough that any fence is going to be a considerable expense but small enough that we're going to see the entire fence from the house. And I'm completely opposed to the idea of fencing only a portion of the property. To me, that's like giving away some of the land we own. We also have a creek to contend with (and I have no idea how you deal with fencing that). (You can see an illustration of our property here to get a better feel for the area).

Here is a good looking short fence with extending wires to get the height needed to keep deer out.

Traditional Landscape by Friday Harbor Landscape Architects & Landscape Designers Island Gardens Company

My initial thoughts on a deer fence are that we could do the short, double fence approach on the western edge of the property over by the vegetable gardens. It's a tight squeeze there because we also use that lawn by the road as overflow parking for guests and as a passing lane on our one-car-at-a-time road, but at least it would look nice and hopefully not be too offputting when driving by.

We might be able to turn the corners and extend that type of fencing situation a bit to the east on either side, simply for aesthetic purposes, and I'd do some kind of pretty design to the fence, at least the one closest to the road. The rest of it would have to be the tall mesh variety of fencing, although we could probably do shorter mesh by the cedar trees lining the driveway because the tall mesh would extend into the branches.

The driveway is a huge issue. We would never do any kind of manually opening gate  because it would never be closed. An electric gate sounds expensive, prone to breakage and ugly. The best solution would have been one that I should have thought of a few months ago, before we paved our driveway. Cattle crates (those metal bars that run across the ground) work on deer too, and so long as you put in a big enough area of them across the width of a driveway, they won't walk across them. But who wants to rip up 7 or 8 feet of brand new driveway for that?

Right now I'm looking for a local fencing company that specializes in deer fencing, but I've had no luck. There are lots of places that sell kits for the mesh-style fence, and that may be something we could do ourselves, but what I really need first is some hands-on advice and an accurate idea of what kind of money we might be talking about.

I still cringe at the thought of a fence around the yard, but then I dream of a garden that is intact and one that I don't have to spend hours each week trying to protect from the herd. I have tried to live at peace with these beautiful creatures but I don't think I can do it any longer.

I'd love to hear any suggestions, experiences or other information you might have about deer fences, fences in general or some magic bullet I'm missing in keeping the deer out of my yard.

Colorful fence proves a little gray is ok when it comes to rules

Rules set in stone have always irked me. I'll admit, I'm not a big follower of the rules, to the point where I'm more interested in breaking one when someone makes a big fuss about how there are no exceptions. I'm not talking about laws here, just rules. I know this is perhaps a bit of an immature viewpoint, but I think rules that are black and white are the lazy man's way of dictating.

I realize that black-and-white rules come about because somewhere, sometime someone took advantage of a more lenient policy and someone complained that it wasn't fair. I totally get that. But just not wanted to have to explain your rational is not a reason to make lazy rules.

This is especially true when there is no good reason for a rule other than, "Well, what if someone else did the same thing but it was mean/ugly/stupid?"

And that's exactly what is happening with a fence in suburban Chicago.

Shawna Coronado is a garden crusader (my term, not hers). Basically a few years ago she quit her job and became a full-time landscaper, blogger, speaker and garden motivator. I've posted pictures from her front-yard vegetable garden from which she donates hundreds of pounds of fresh vegetables to food pantries every year. She's also done a great TED talk.

A few months ago, the fence outside Shawna's family's house was sprayed with graffiti. I can't imagine how violated I would feel if someone did that at my house, especially when you spend so much time trying to make the outside beautiful for yourself and your neighbors.

Nobody wants to see graffiti in their neighborhood and graffiti often begets graffiti (by the way, what ended up on Shawna's fence was not at all artistic, so there was no pleasure to be gained by it). There's not much to do beyond covering it up. But that's not so pretty either. So Shawna decided to fight graffiti with beauty. It turns out that what really works to deter graffiti in the long term is art according to Shawna's research.

She had muralist Peter Thaddeus turn what was a fence that had obviously been painted to cover graffiti into a work of art. It's bright and cheery and far more welcoming than graffiti. To me, it sends the message that the people in this neighborhood have pride in where they live.

And here's where the rules became a problem. You see, Shawna's HOA doesn't allow fences to be decoratively painted because they don't want to be in the business of determining what is "art" and what isn't. I get that. They are a group of volunteers just trying to make their neighborhood better. I suppose they aren't different from Shawna in that regard. But this kind of black-and-white rule is a good example of a lazy rule. Let's be honest here: I bet there isn't a person in that neighborhood who thinks Shawna's fence is ugly. It's not a huge area, it's cheery as heck and frankly it's the kind of thing that would make me want to live in that neighborhood. The HOA just doesn't want to stand up and give its unspoken stamp of approval and face the chance that in the future some inconsiderate homeowner will claim that his half rotten, falling down fence is also art and therefore he should be able to keep it.

Of course, there are already fences like that in Shawna's neighborhood. And those, apparently, are fine.

Shawna's is not. She's being fined $30 a month for having a fence that does not meet the HOA's rules. So she's launched an initiative to sponsor her fence for a month so she can continue to spread the message that graffiti will not be tolerated in this neighborhood.

And it gets worse. She had the message "Make a Diff" incorporated into the mural, but it turns out that's problematic too. The City of Warrenville deemed that those words qualify as advertising because they tie in with Shawna's "make a difference" statements on her website. So she had to have that changed as well, lest she face a $750 fine. Now the mural says, "Grow community."

It takes guts to stand up for something you believe in, and it take serious guts to do it when you know that it's going to upset some of your neighbors. Guts don't seem to be an issue for Shawna.

Some people don't agree with Shawna's stance and she's taken a bit of heat about it on Facebook. She admits that the mural violates the HOA's fence policy, although she didn't know that at the time she commissioned Thaddeus to paint it. But that's not the point. The point is that it's a lazy rule. And we, as a society, ought to be better than that.

All photos are owned by Shawna Coronado and are used with her permission.