How to Build an Easy DIY Garden Fence
Before I built my easy DIY garden fence, there were 2 things in the garden driving me crazy: stray cats, and landscapers weed-whipping my kabocha squash vines in half.
I thought about getting some pre-built trellis’ for my squash, but all I could find were decorative overhead arches or wooden privacy lattices. I wanted to train my vines to grow more horizontally than vertically, so that wouldn’t work. As far as a garden fence goes, I knew I needed a customizable solution – my raised beds are all different shapes and sizes, so standard lengths wouldn’t cut it.
We put our heads together here at Offbeet-Gardener.com and came up with a solution. Follow these instructions and you can build a fenced-in vegetable garden in just 9 steps. I promise that even the least handy of people (ahem, me) can tackle this project in less than a weekend.
Building a custom garden fence is a simple way to keep critters out of your garden while also giving your climbing plants a trellis to crawl across. Give it a try!
How to Build an Easy DIY Garden Fence
Materials
- Hardware cloth (it’s like a sturdier chicken wire)
- Garden stakes
- Tin snips
- Gardening gloves
- Zip-ties
- Hammer
- A small piece of scrap wood
- Measuring tape
- Sharpie
- Pen and paper
Directions
1. Measure the length of the area that you need to fence in and write the measurements down. For example, my garden beds are 4’x8’ rectangles, so I needed 4 pieces of garden fence: two 4’ pieces and two 8’ pieces.
2. While wearing your gardening gloves, unroll your hardware cloth and measure out the length of your first side. Using your measuring tape, mark off the line that you need to cut.
3. Using your tin snips, cut down the line that you marked off. This will make the first side of your fence. Take care not to accidentally stab yourself on the hardware cloth, it can get sharp after it’s cut.
4. Repeat this process for each side of fence.
5. Take a garden stake and zip-tie it horizontally along the top of your hardware cloth. Each garden stake is 4 feet long, so put stakes one after another until you reach the end of your hardware cloth. This will give your fence more structure.
6. Zip-tie a garden stake vertically where each horizontal stake ends. These are the stakes that you’ll drive into the ground or bed.
7. Zip-tie a garden stake vertically on the ends of your garden fence.
8. Starting at the end of your fence, take your scrap wood and hold it on top of the vertical stake. Using the hammer, carefully tap the stake into the ground. The wood is used to cushion the hammer blows because the stakes can bend. Move along your garden area and repeat this process with each vertical stake. Drive the stakes in until the bottom of the chicken wire meets the ground.
9. Repeat until your space is fenced in.
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