Not a SINGLE DEER Has Crossed this Fence to Eat Our Garden and Orchard!

hey everybody and welcome back to Living Traditions Homestead we're outside today because it is a gorgeous day here in the Missouri Ozarks and we wanted to bring you along as we go back into our garden area today and answer some questions for you that we had after the last video we did where we started to amend our garden plot we've realized that over the last year or so we have gained a lot of new viewers a lot of new subscribers that are not familiar with everything that's going on within that Garden area we refer to our chicken moat and Orchard and all kinds of things that may be kind of new to many of you so we thought that today we would just kind of explain everything that's going on over there and answer a lot of your questions so let's start by going inside of this first gate I want to introduce to you guys that may not know what the chicken moat area is why we have it how we designed it and how it's working for us after our last video we had a lot of questions about our double fence system around our garden area especially from newer people who may not have been around when we were building this and designing all of it so we thought we'd answer some of those questions first today so you'll notice that around our garden area this is about a one acre area and we've put up two fences around this area they're about six feet apart and about 900 feet all the way around when we first bought this piece of property this area was part of our hay field and so there was a large deer population that was used to getting in this area we knew that this is where we wanted to garden and plant our Orchard and things like that and we needed a way to be able to keep the deer out of that area we started to do a lot of research and there were really two options for keeping deer out of a large area we could either build one really tall fence that would have needed to be a minimum of eight feet tall but nine to ten feet tall ideally to keep all of the white-tailed deer out that we have in this area the second option that we found which we actually found in a really old issue of Mother Earth News from back in the 1960s was to do this double fence system now even back in the 60s they were calling this the old way of keeping deer out and it just really intrigued us because it seemed like a much easier thing to do and aesthetically pleasing thing to do than to build a super tall fence so the way that this works is that basically we have two fences they're six feet apart and they're only about four and a half feet tall the reason that it works is because deer don't have great depth perception so when they come up to the first fence and they look they're not quite sure if they're going to be able to make it over both fences and because they're afraid of getting trapped in the middle they decide not to jump over it at all now we've had this set up for a little over two years and we haven't had a single deer get past this double fence system we gardened here last year we didn't have any deer in the garden we've had no signs of deer uh chewing on our Orchard trees and it has just worked really well to keep the deer out so we are super excited about it now for those of you who are newer you may sometimes hear us refer to this as the chicken moat and the reason that we call it that is because after we built this we realized we have this whole big long area again it's almost 900 feet long that's six feet wide that it goes all the way around and we didn't know what we would do with that area it's not wide enough to Garden in or anything like that so we decided that during the summer months our chickens would be confined to this area it's still plenty of room for them to free range and they get to go all the way around this area right now we have this divided into two sections uh one half is for our chickens and the other half is for our ducks now over winter we opened the gates and we let them in because we want them to scratch around in the garden like we had showed you in the last video but over summer all of the gates get shut and then the chickens are confined just to the six foot wide area now the chickens need some place to be safe overnight and so we built some what we call hoop coops you can see one of them here the hook coops have been a very affordable way to make a chicken coop it's basically some two by fours cattle panels some chicken wire and some billboard material now you can see right here that we have the back and we actually have the front kind of boarded up and that's for winter in the summer we take these off so that there's a nice breeze through there they get more light it stays cooler in there but this is serving us well for the chickens they've got nesting boxes in there and perches and things and each one has a little door that we let them out so they can eat and scratch around and stuff like that so we have one of these for our chickens we have one of these for our ducks now when we first brought our Birds over here we had the chickens and the Ducks together and they were getting along fine it was it was an okay deal but what we realized is that they were not using the entire space all around here that's when we separated the Ducks say the Ducks you can be over here chicken you can be over here maybe they'll utilize more of the space come to find out they're really each only using about a quarter of this chicken moat area so over time we will be separating this entire chicken moat area into four separate spaces which means at some point we'll also be building two more hoop coops we know for sure that we're going to be using one of those spaces to raise our meat chickens our American breasts chickens for our meat we don't know yet where we're going to use the four spot for we'll just have to figure that out as time goes by so now that we've talked about the outside the chicken moat area let's go inside so we can give you guys kind of a lay of the land a description of the layout of what all things we have going on inside there so now we're inside of what we generally just call our garden area although it is more than just the Garden area you can see here are the hoop Coupes this is the back side of the hoop Coupes from where we were before and then over here is our actual Garden area this is our in-ground Garden where we were showing you guys a couple videos ago where we're spreading things out to let the chickens kind of you know get the soil amended for us you can see we have a couple chicken tractors right now those have extra roosters in them that we're raising up for meat right now now eventually we hope to no longer have to raise our extra roosters and tractors but we'll actually give them part of the chicken moat but that involves this building more hoop coops and things like that so that's down the road so that's the Garden area and where the roosters are right now but like I said earlier this is actually divided into several different sections this is about a one acre section so about a third of it is for our garden area the next third of it right here in the middle is where we have our Orchard now these trees have been in the ground this will be their third summer coming up so they're still quite young they're not ready to start producing fruit yet some of them are still pretty small because they started to just bare root trees but they are definitely growing and doing well we'll get a little more in depth with them a little later on in this video and then down on the other side of this area where there's nothing at all yet that is where someday we plan on doing grapes and berries again we'll talk a little bit more about that later on in this video for now let's head back over to the Garden area because we had a ton of questions about some of the things that we use in the garden after our last video and we know especially some of you who may not have been following for real long uh will want those questions answered now when we first moved to Missouri well actually let's back up a little bit further than that when we lived in Arizona we did Back to Eden gardening and Back to Eden gardening worked really really well in Arizona so when we moved to Missouri we thought we'll just do exactly the same thing in Missouri and it'll probably work even better in Missouri we were wrong by the end of our first gardening season we had weeds so high I mean they were we could barely find the actual garden and some of the weeds were taller than we were well and not because we just never went out there to pick weeds we just couldn't keep up right like the the rain amazing weather just made those suckers grow so fast and so big we just had never seen anything like it right so we knew after that summer that we needed to find something else something different that would work to make gardening more enjoyable and to keep the weed pressure down right so we did a lot of research about different ways to garden and that is when we found the woven weed fabric that we've been using now for the last five years and you guys it has been an absolute blessing to have discovered this and it has made gardening so much fun again now the woven weed fabric is different than like solid plastic or like a tarp right the fibers are actually woven together which allows the moisture the rain and the irrigation water to go through the woven weed fabric it also allows for lots of ventilation through there and it acts kind of like a mulch right you know a mulch suppresses weeds and uh keeps the soil cooler and you'd think that basically plastic woven plastic would heat up the soil it actually makes it cooler right we've actually done a video in the past and we showed you guys we took a thermometer and we stuck it through the weed fabric to test the temperature of the soil under the weed fabric and the temperature of the soil outside of the weed fabric and the temperature is actually cooler underneath this woven ground cover now the other thing that we've used for a long time even in Arizona along with Back to Eden gardening but especially here in Missouri is drip tape irrigation and a lot of you have questions about this as well so I've just got a little piece of it here drip tape irrigation it comes on a roll I think this comes on I don't know it's like a 300 or 500 000 foot roll something I don't know it's a big roll anyway it comes on a roll and you just roll it out it hooks to a main line and we've got videos about how to set all of this up but basically on here there's a dripper Eve every foot and these use very little water pressure so you can do this through a big area with very little water pressure and it's a very efficient way to water your plants so this is how we water our garden all summer long we run this you know every few days depending on how much rain we've had but we run this every few days for a couple hours and it keeps our garden doing well all summer long now the wovenweed fabric and the type of irrigation that we're using both of those are available online through growersolution.com right there are other places that you can get it but you want to make sure that you're getting a good brand that is nice and thick Mill plastic right the brand that we use is called DeWitt Sunbelt and it has I mean it it will last a good you know five to ten years um so it's not something that you need to buy every single year so that is very important like Sarah said to make sure you're actually getting a good brand because I have noticed recently especially like on Amazon Amazon and things that there are some off brands starting to come up and maybe they're fine but I don't think I'd spend the money on something that I wasn't sure about absolutely another question we get a lot about the garden is what we use for trellising and you guys we've used so many different kinds of trellises over the years and we've finally settled on this trellis system that's been working really well for us basically this is a cattle panel that we attached to t-posts with t-post clips this is very sturdy we can reuse it year after year now these cattle panels they're about 52 inches high and 16 feet long we we suspend these off the ground maybe 12 to 18 inches so so that we can maximize the height that the plants can grow we use this trellis for cucumbers lots of other kind of Vining plants but we also really like it for tying Tomatoes too Our tomato plants get higher than this every year and we use these to support them so they don't flop over and get damaged we also use them for pepper plants we do sometimes have pepper plants that get really tall we can we can tie them to these trellises to make sure that they don't fall over with the weight of all of their Peppers so this is a fantastic solution for you guys it's economical it's reusable and it's really easy to install so with this woven weed fabric you actually plant your plants inside of here well how do you do that the best way that we've found is to burn holes in the woven weed fabric we don't recommend cutting holes or cutting slits in here because it's a fabric that will Fray but by burning it it melts your hole and and so it won't Fray these days we are using a butane lighter uh you can get these separate from these tops here but really you guys anything that you can use to burn a hole in it will be fine so it this part isn't as important as just finding a way to burn holes into your plastic now we also get questions especially because you're burning permanent holes in your weed fabric like what do you do in the situation where you know plants just have different spacing what do you do with all of that you know some plants are you know three inches apart some are six inches apart some are 12 18 3 feet apart like how do you manage all of that well we've decided is that we are going to use three different types of plant spacing and that is universal we'll use it universally for all the plants okay so we burn holes at six inches apart 18 inches apart and three feet apart and all the plants that we plant in the ground within this weed fabric fall into one of those three spacings now right here where I'm at these holes are 18 inches apart we will use these for tomatoes peppers okra cucumbers and that seems to work well for really anything that is recommended to plant either 12 inches to 24 inches apart 18 inches of happy medium and it works really well now here you can see that these holes uh these are burned closer together these are six inch spacing we use these for green beans pole beans edamame which is a soybean peas and there are other Springtime vegetables that you can plant in here also you could do turnips rutabagas you could probably do onions in here and and so this works well for things that are planted a lot closer together now plants that are farther apart because they Vine a lot like your winter squash zucchini squash watermelons those kinds of things that's what we use the three foot spacing for so by really consolidating the spacing you don't have to worry so much or get so overwhelmed with burning these permanent holes in your weed fabric and having so many different spacings just pick one of three spacings and that should help you out another question we've gotten a lot in the last week or so after our video where we were working in the garden is about the type of fencing that we use around the Garden in that video we showed us taking down our electric netting around the garden and so many of you have messaged us or emailed us asking for specifics about that fencing it's made by a company called Premiere one and it is electrified poultry netting they sell it for a lot of different things but what we use is the poultry netting we do hook this to an Energizer in the summer so that it is electrified and it will help keep animals out now it helps a lot with bigger things like raccoons and possums and things like that for I've noticed for things like small rabbits and squirrels it doesn't do a really great job but we fortunately don't have a big problem with those things here so if you do have a lot of pressure from things like rabbits and squirrels then it may not be the best solution for you although it will definitely keep some of them out it may just not keep all of them out now we have had a lot of questions about whether or not this will keep deer out on our last Homestead we used this exclusively around our garden we didn't have this double fence system and we didn't have any problem with deer now I don't know if that's just coincidence or if they were actually deterred by this fence they could definitely jump over this fence it's only about four feet tall so they could definitely jump over it but we never had an issue with deer but again I can't say a hundred percent that this fencing will keep deer out if you live in an area where there's a ton of deer pressure all right so that's kind of the lowdown of what we do in our garden area we want to show you guys also some of the future plans that we have for this area the area that we're standing in right now which is you know right next to the Garden close to the house is where we've decided that Sarah will finally get her permanent herb garden if you've been following us for any amount of time you've probably heard Sarah talk about why she grows her herbs in tubs instead of having a permanent herb garden and it's because we've never really picked out a really good spot for it now that ended up being kind of a blessing for us because now that we've moved she's been able to bring all those herbs with us but now that we are officially here on this property it's time for her to have a permanent herb garden and that is going to be in this area we're actually going to be doing that with raised beds we'll be sharing more of that with you guys down the road but we're going to have raised beds for herbs and some other raised beds in this area as well we think it's going to be a cool project that hopefully we'll at least get to start on this year but I don't think we'll get to finish it this year it's going to be a pretty big project and we really want to make sure we do it right so that's kind of the plan for this area let's walk over to the other side of the garden I think Sarah wants to talk to you guys a little bit about the Orchard and how that's doing and then we'll move on to the next section now we're over here in the orchard area this is actually a small tree or for our Orchard now I think we have like 13 trees we'll be adding a few here and there over the years we've got a big variety of trees here we've got Peach apple pear Plum sweet cherries sour cherries and crab apple I'd like to add Mulberry I'd like to add apricot and I think also fig tree but that that'll be in the future now these trees are from Stark Brothers here in Missouri and we've always had really good luck with that company the really nice thing besides the fact that they have really good quality trees and other plants and berry bushes and stuff they have basically a guarantee if any of their trees die within one year of you purchasing them they will replace it and there are really not many nurseries out there that have that long of a guarantee honestly I think in the last five or six years that we have had trees by star sharks we've only had one that didn't work out and they replaced it and then it did fine so we recommend them for sure we're really excited to see a lot of growth on these trees this year the last two summers they haven't really done a lot above ground because they've been doing most of their growing below ground this is typically the year that you see a lot of growth above Brown I'm really we're really excited about that and then maybe next year a first small Harvest this last section back here next to the orchard is our work in progress and we'll be our work in progress for a while this is a nice big space we plan to plant grapes over here and berries hopefully blueberries blackberries and I'd really love some raspberries also we are hoping to at least get started on this project this year to get one of those things planted but this fact here is definitely going to be a multi-year project but we're excited to have grapes and berries one day so we hope that this video helped answered some of the questions especially that some of our newer subscribers have as far as how we Garden some of the things that we use and just kind of what this whole area is when we talk about things like the chicken moat or the orchard area now you'll have a better understanding of where all of that is on the homestead head and how that all fits together we're excited that this year is going to be the first year that we can spend 100 of our time working planning our dreams here on this property we're not split between between two anymore and we're so excited for this coming year you guys if you're enjoying our videos make sure to hit the Subscribe button below and remember that the best way you can help us here on the homestead is just to share our videos on your social media until next time thank you so much for stopping by our Homestead take care and God bless God bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 96,916

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing

Id: HuvSCKLZQpY

Length: 23min 11sec (1391 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 22 2023