12. It's the Chicken Wire, Stupid
Life Lessons of a Backyard Gardener
NOTE: This is Chapter 12 of my online book, which is a work in progress. Enjoy.
A few years after we settled into our home, the landscaping bug hit hard. For starters, the sketchy, toxic timbers that the previous owner called “borders” had reached the twilight of their unfortunate service life. By that period of my own service life, I was overbooked with family and professional responsibilities. I am a do-it-yourselfer to the core, but life’s priorities were cramping my homesteader wannabe style. Garden borders not being particularly high on the priority list of a busy, youngish homeowner, I sought the simplest solution that might also qualify as semi-permanent.
One may reasonably question if having a few tons of fieldstone delivered on pallets qualifies as “simple”, let alone “simplest” -- perhaps a life lesson for another time. I cannot explain the sequence of logic that weaved through my cluttered brain. But an order was placed, a flatbed truck arrived a few days later, and half a dozen pallets of neatly stacked stone soon awaited my attention on the driveway.
It turns out that delivering stone in neat stacks is a neat trick. Nature doesn’t create fieldstone for easy packaging and shipping. The stuff will naturally shake and tumble and shatter. And then you have to get it off the truck. Enter pallets and forklifts, the forks and knives of the warehouse realm. It’s a great system -- but one whose glorious efficiency is for naught, at least in this application, without one additional, teensy bit of hardware that protects everything from mutually assured destruction.
I speak, of course, of chicken wire.
Just as a mouse trap won’t catch anything without little clips to hold it together, a forklift is powerless against a stack of stone that will disintegrate into mayhem at the tiniest nudge. Chicken wire is the glue -- strong enough to hold knobbly piles of rocks together, but flexible enough to conform to the geometric vagaries of natural stone. As its names (“chicken wire”, “poultry netting”, etc.) suggest, it was invented nearly two centuries ago to improve poultry enclosures. But, like duct tape a century later, the unintended consequences multiplied. By the twentieth century, soldiers were using it to attach vegetation to helmets for camouflage. And, of course, it can hold piles of rock together very nicely, thank you.
The truck and its friendly driver departed with the forklift safely aboard, and I was left with that feeling a dad has when arriving home from the hospital with his first child: My god, what have I done??? Where’s the manual? This particular sparkle in my eye just bore a different kind of fruit -- really heavy fruit -- all of which would somehow need to be moved and converted into pretty borders. By me. Ugh. Whose idea was this anyway? Well, the best place to start is the beginning, so I found the wire cutters and began to clip away, freeing the hundreds of stones on the pallets from their chicken wire prisons. Over the course of a few weeks, my trusty wheel barrow and I carted tons of stone around the property, as borders and stepping stones and small retaining walls emerged. I also learned about obscure muscles in the human anatomy that folks like me don’t know exist, until they rebel on the sofa after a day of rearranging rocks.
But this tale is not really about rustic landscape borders, fieldstone workouts, or even the cool fossils buried within the stones. It’s about packaging. What to do with a couple hundred square feet of gnarled, unexpected chicken wire? Granted, some people own chickens, but I don’t (and even if I did… then what?). You could squash it and put it in the trash. Or recycle it -- which always sounds good, but still involves destroying something and starting over (cue Debbie Downer horn notes).
Here’s the problem: We take stuff like chicken wire for granted. If you were lost in the wilderness, your perspective on various “junk” would elevate considerably. It takes a lot to make stuff like chicken wire. Or glass bottles. Or those evil, wiry ties that ensnare children’s toys in their packaging. This truth haunts me whenever I glance at a trash can. The industrialized lifestyle is an intricate house of cards. If you were on a deserted island, you would give anything for a roll of chicken wire, a few glass bottles and some plastic ties. In suburbia? Trash.
With many such neuroses surfing my thoughts, I rolled up the chicken wire and found a place for it in the loft of the shed. And there it remained for about five years, forgotten by all but the mice. It was no worse for the experience, since mice can’t chew through chicken wire.
Mice can’t chew through chicken wire. Hmm. The light bulb went on.
I cannot say how many jewels of personal wisdom in my lifetime have involved squirrels — it can’t be many. But this is one of them. Organic gardens are nearly self-immunized to many pests. Birds eat the bugs. Centipedes patrol the bad guys in the soil. Pill bugs keep things tidy. But, by themselves, gardens are powerless against squirrels -- which, unfortunately, have neither self-respect nor regard for human labor or etiquette. Squirrels like to dig, and garden soil is some of the most digable stuff available to a furry little rodent unencumbered by common decency. After all, humans already do most of the work. And squirrels particularly enjoy raised containers. I suppose they learn early on that it’s an easy dig. Smart little bastards.
They are particularly active in the spring and fall. Fall isn’t as much of a problem, with the beds full of vegetation and the soil not as accessible. But spring can be difficult, with large open spaces of soft soil begging for little claws to disturb. For years I had ceded part of all seed beds to the evil rats with bushy tails. I would sow the seed, and discover about a third of it destroyed by the next morning, predictable as gravity, celestial mechanics, Maxwell’s equations, death and taxes. You repair the damage, sow a little new seed, and hope for the best. But not anymore.
My raised beds are just repurposed fiberglass boxes from a warehouse, about thirty two inches square. The chicken wire that lay dormant in the shed was about three feet wide. Still, the solution eluded me -- I can be dim as a squirrel on blacktop sometimes. It wasn’t until I decided to clean out the shed on one hopeful spring morning, and rediscovered the chicken wire in the loft, that it occurred to me. Even then, my initial intention was to clean out and recycle. Finally, two met two and had no alternative but to make four. “Chicken wire, meet my garden boxes; garden boxes, meet chicken wire.” The introduction thus made, the two became inseparable. And together, they have effectively frustrated the squirrels for years. Problem solved. Unless you’re a squirrel.
The solution is probably already there, waiting for your mind to catch up.