Friday, March 19, 2010

How to make a garden fence out of sticks

I needed a fence because my dogs have a habit of running without looking where they are heading.  So, I didn't really need it to be strong, rather to have a visual impact to the dogs, so they stay out.  I am also an organic gardener, so I wanted something that looked natural.  The only cost to this fence is for cotton string to bind the intersections.

This is how I did it.  I use 4 main pieces, about 2 1/2 feet long as the legs to go into the ground.

 Next, I use two smaller pieces of study twigs between each of the 4 longer ones.  Then I took long sticks (these are the sucker branches that we trimmed off our apple trees this winter) and threaded them over and under these sticks.  I would start and stop wherever there seemed to need bracing.  I only would do about 4-5 sticks in each intersection.  Then I tied each intersection.  Here is the first row done.

I would loop around each side an then knot it at the bigger sticks, as they are the main supports, but just criss-cross tied the intersections of the smaller sticks.  Here is an example of the knots.
  I added two more rows of sticks, making sure each intersection is tied.  I tried to keep them straight as possible, but wasn't too upset if it varied, as I liked the look of a "natural fence"
Here is the finished fence, I used a hammer and pounded the longer sticks into the ground to make it secure.
I hope this gives you ideas on how to use natural materials to help around the garden.

5 comments:

  1. very cool....:-). We were thinking of building our own arbor in the backyard and have several Crape Myrtle tree branches from a lot of trees that we prunned. What do you suggest for the ties?

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  2. Thanks so much for your idea. It really helped give us an inexpensive way to protect our gardens.

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  3. Nice information, valuable and excellent design, as share good stuff with good ideas and concepts
    hegn

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  4. Thank You so much for sharing! I have done this on a larger scale back in the day, this is perfect, like you say , to keep a visual for my dog, he spots flowers, he will stop dead no matter where , and smell them!

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I like to hear ideas.