Cindy's Varmint Panels

We live on a canyon that is home to many different types of wild critters, from large animals such as coyotes, deer, Tree Foxes, raccoons and skunks, to smaller animals like the California Ground Squirrels, rabbits, canyon rats and gophers.  The problem with having a vegetable garden is that many of these animals also like the vegetables we grow.

Critters Like Tomatoes, Too.

We absolutely refuse to resort to poison to protect the garden from these critters, so that leaves exclusion as our only means of protecting the vegetable plants and fruit from the varmints that would love to eat them.

Cindy has spent a lot of time over the past fifteen years devising a system that will keep the vegetables safe from the varmints, but allow her easy access to the plants and the vegetables.  She has created a system of protective panels made from plexiglass and hardware cloth that do this pretty effectively.  

We were asked recently to provide some pictures of the panels so that the school garden program might be able to learn how to use similar panels.  I though it might be helpful to make that information available here, so I'm going to spend the next several blog entries talking about Cindy's panel system.

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