Cindy's Varmint Panels--From The Ground Up

Cindy uses a system of plexiglass and hardware cloth panels to exclude tomato-eating critters from the vegetable garden, but construction of the system starts from the ground up.

The first thing we did was to get rid of the grass lawn.  There are various ways to do this; since we planned to grow vegetables, using an herbicide was not an option, so we put down landscaping fabric to kill off the grass months before we planned to start constructing the system.

First Raised Bed

The next step is to construct the raised beds.  Using raised beds prevents varmints from digging under the panels to gain entry to the veggies on the other side.  The raised beds don't have to be too high--it's really a matter of how high you want them to be.

The first set of raised beds that we constructed was made from 2 x 6 boards stacked three high on top of each other, with 4 x 4 posts sunk in concrete on the outside of the boards every few feet to bolster the sides of the beds and insure that the mass of dirt in the beds did not cause the sides of the beds to collapse.  We also ran another 2 x 6 around the top edge to form a seat, but that proved not to be too practical for that purpose, as it's not really wide enough to sit on comfortably.

We used some plastic interlocking corners that allowed us to make them any angle we wanted, but we could have just screwed or nailed the corners together.  One thing we discovered with subsequent raised beds is that if you put your support posts on the outside of the bed, rather than on the inside, it makes it easier to construct the panel system and install the irrigation later.  

Ask us how we learned this.