The landscape fabric came on Friday! Bill had already chopped, mowed, and cleaned up the area to prepare it for putting fabric down. We found 3 tposts and a holiday weekend was in front of us. Thankfully the rain had stopped.
You can see the side of the shop, to it’s left is the entrance to the original garden. Directly in front of that is a sharp drop off into the woods. The large black object is a lean-to we built using cattle panels, t-posts and a tarp. It was fast, easy, and worked really well to protect the sawmill and log mover along with lots of miscellaneous objects. You can see how the ground slopes down and away from it. Where that first t-post is the slope is extreme, nothing can be grown there, you can barely walk there. In total the space will be about 27′ x 24′ and most of it will be usable. That little green thing is an Aldi green house, these things are so cool. It’s been a cool, wet spring here. Being able to start moving plants out of the basement, yet keep them protected from pests and temps has been a huge improvement this year. As an example of what we typically face I moved 3 bags of pumpkins to the outside of the fence. The idea is we will move the grape tubs there and between each grape we will have two bags of pumpkins or winter squash. The vines can go out into the grass area. Each bag will have two plants in it. The same night I moved those first bags out into the yard something came along and dug them up. It was total decimation. I had forgotten to put the milk jugs over them. Keeping them inside the fence and protected from cooler night time temps and marauding nature AND our own dog, cats, and chickens is huge.
Thursday night we got most of the fabric down but ran out of staples. Bill also got the 3 t-posts we had pounded in.
Saturday the staples came so we finished the fabric and got it all secured. We had gone to town to pick up the fencing and more t-posts. While I was securing the fabric Bill was pounding in fence posts. He decided to go about 10′ apart with the posts. We got the fencing from Home Depot, after checking prices it was half the price of anywhere else. We normally buy our chicken wire from Rural King, they have it in stock and it’s not crazy expensive. This time we did price checking and discovered that if we ordered it from Home Depot it was almost half the price of Rural King. We discovered it’s not really the same fencing it’s what they call fencer wire, poultry netting, not chicken wire. 
It stretches both vertically and horizontally and the holes are more the size of chain link fence not chicken wire. For our purposes it will work just fine. It actually made fencing in the slope much easier. We leave a good 12″ at the top to flop and another 2′ at the bottom as a skirt. The entire fence was completed in one day.
Now the way that we run it isn’t standard, we used to run it in the more conventional way and then Bill left me home alone. By myself I could not hold the fence up and keep it tight and twist the metal ties to secure it to the t-post. I could use zip ties and using that method I ran a lot of fencing by myself. I could also use the zip ties to “fix” any loose fencing by pulling sections together and zipping them to make them tighter. 
We have been here 17 years now and in that time it’s worked. Has it been perfect? No, but it has allowed us to get things done. I also know that running just a skirt without digging down will not prevent diggers from getting in at least not 100%. What it does protect us from is the digger who just wants to go under the edge of the fence to get in. What I count on helping us a little bit is the fact that the ground up here is so hard and rocky that it will discourage tunnel digging by predators. I also have given up my illusions of being able to keep anything that really wants to get in from getting in. I’ve watched racoons figure out how to get in and this was back in the day when we had electrified the fence. I’ve watched a possum walk along the top of the chicken wire fencing (this was before we started using the floppy top method). I’ve had chickens fly over the fence to get out! Nothing is perfect and in order to get things done I am giving up perfect. I also know that there are many different opinions about landscape fabric and whether or not you should or should not use it. In our original fenced garden we did not use it. For a long time it was okay and we were able to keep up on it. Now it is a constant struggle. The next bit of garden we did started with no fabric and is now completely covered in fabric. It still needs tending to because the staples come up, you get tears, weeds find a way. Overall we are much happier with it down. 
We started buying this from Amazon a couple years ago and have been much happier with it than what we were finding locally. The 6′ width works for projects like this, less seams = less headaches. Bill intends to run this around the entire garden area, original garden and the berry garden. When we put those gardens in we went as close to the drop off as we could. This means that doing anything on the outside of the garden fence is incredibly difficult. The weeds know this and they thrive in this area.
Monday Bill took one of the home-made gates off the original garden and installed it on the wood deck post on the garden side of the lean too. We realized that we were going to need a way to go directly into this section of the gardens. 
Going through the door by the chicken yard and walking all the way around was fine until you started carrying 30 bags of compost. Initially we thought the door to the new garden area would go on the outside wall of the fence by the lean to. The wood post of the wood deck solved some mounting issues for the door and Bill figured out how to “skin” the tpost using a 2×4, for the latch. For now the other original garden door into the new section is still up. Since the entire fence is not compete this gives Tas a place to run free and also if something comes into the new garden area via that open spot at least it won’t be able to get into the main garden areas. We finished up securing the bottom skirt of the fence and zip tying the two fence sections together. We also moved all of the dirt and things I would need to start planting into the garden while we could still get the tractor in there. We moved the sawmill and log mover out of the lean to along with everything else and then put things back in there in a more organized manner. The sawmill will remain on the asphalt drive in front of the shop so that Bill can do some maintenance on it. We got fabric down by the she shed and the log mover will live there for awhile. With it all cleaned out it’s a lot easier to see how the project will lay out and it feels great to finally be starting. For so many years now we have said, “Next spring” and then spring came and went and nothing. We also decided to move the grapes to the outside of the new garden area. They will get full sun there, it won’t eat up any real-estate because the fence is already there and it will clean up the front of the shop where the milling will be done.
In the end we didn’t get it all done we still have one little section of fence to complete. Work started and with work came the rain so progress will be shut down for a few days. While Bill was at work on Tuesday I took advantage of our last sunny day and moved a table and umbrella into the new garden. I built three more of those small greenhouses from Aldi and started planting pumpkins and melons in grow bags. We were going to do a pumpkin patch directly in the ground over to the side of the new garden area but when we decided to move the grapes to the fence I suggested maybe we put the pumpkins in bags and put them between the grapes then let the vines go out away from the fence. We also realized that there is enough room in this new area to put up the big greenhouse. We wanted to try growing the melons inside the greenhouse. The cantaloupes will go down the middle and will grow up strings and the watermelons will grow on one side with their vines on the ground. I got the idea from Charles Dowding, and while our environments are different I think it will be interesting to compare the results from greenhouse growing to how we have been doing it.
Not bad for a weeks worth of part time work. This is going to be a great year.
