Over the course of several years, I’ve been converting our front lawn into an intensively planted garden. One challenge early on was controlling rodent damage (primarily from rabbits). It was practically impossible to start plants like lettuce or spinach, for example, because rabbits would eat any new growth.
In order to prevent rodents from tunneling under the fence, I dug a foot deep trench, then buried sections of hardware cloth in the trench. The cloth is bent into an “L” shape at the bottom to keep rodents from dugging down and then up again.
Each post is pressure treated and sunk about four feet down so that it’s below the frost line. I used 3/4″ crushed gravel, packed firm, to hold the posts in place (as opposed to concrete). This way, when the posts need to be replaced, I can break up the gravel with an iron bar, extract the old post, dig out the gravel and then put a new post in. This is much easier than digging out a solid chunk of concrete. It also improves drainage around the feet of the posts, and is faster to install. This was a ton of labor — and I had a lot of help — thanks Angie and Ozweego!
