Mending fences is a wonderful metaphor for relationship building, but I have come to find that it is also a necessary practicality for the serious gardener and locavore. My beloved youngest dog has an appetite not only for some of the vegetables that I grow, but also for the drip irrigation. He is prone to grab a drip line in his teeth and pull it off of the main feed. I see him pass my window at a dead run with it still in his teeth, flying out behind him like the tail on a kite. Eventually I find the remains of the emitter, a small, shapeless lump of green plastic reminiscent of old chewing gum. If my canine children and my idea to have a vegetable garden that feeds us are to coexist, firm boundaries are a necessity.
In the past few weeks I have surrounded the three large raised beds with a four-foot-high wire and picket fence, the kind that comes in large rolls at the farm supply. It stands tall enough to discourage the canine interlopers, but still low and light enough so that the garden does not resemble an exercise yard at the local minimum security prison. My young olive trees drape gracefully over it as if it were a trellis. However, if I am to get in and out of the garden with the wheelbarrow and necessary supplies, I will need sturdy gates at each end. I studied the various types of fences and gates that my neighbors have constructed as I drive to and from town each week, and decided upon a basic design. A picture cut out of a borrowed gardening magazine inspired the idea of a twig fence. We understood the impracticality of constructing the entire fence in this manner, but surely it could not be that difficult to build gates with a facing of twigs and sticks collected from the dead fall of redwood and other branches surrounding our property?
Over the past week, I had collected a variety of long sticks, most less than a couple of inches around. This Sunday, I assembled the materials and began the project. The actual construction of the gates themselves had been performed the week before, so the first order of business was to cut thin redwood boards and mount them horizontally across the top and bottom of the gate structure. After completing this simple task with no difficulty, I began to cut or break the stick and twigs into the proper lengths. Almost as if I were assembling a puzzle, I laid the various pieces across the boards, and, after rearranging the patterns several times, began to attach the sticks to the frame. The actual complexity of the job revealed itself in all of its humbling glory, as I noticed the relationship between the length of the nails and the thickness of the sticks. The trick was to use a nail large and long enough to secure the stick without causing the stick to split, rendering it useless. Two long hours later, my knees were stiff and bruised from the concrete floor of the garage, and I was surrounded by a minefield of bent and broken nails, not to mention the broken remains of many of the sticks. Of course, the most beautiful moss covered sticks I selected were, in fact, oak, and almost impossible to pierce without bending the narrow nails required to tack their gnarly bodies to the gate. Belatedly remembering that oak is, (aha!) a hardwood, I was little comforted by the knowledge. When I finally stood the finished gates up against the wall, I was delighted to see that they were beautiful as well as functional. I was all the more pleased because I had somehow produced these pieces of art with my own hands, scraped and bruised as they were.
We mounted the gates on their hinges, and now they serve as guardians to the summer vegetable garden to come. As if to christen them, the puppy ceremoniously peed on the corner post; demonstrating, I suppose, his displeasure at being banned from access to his favorite play space. Somehow in county living and farming, we have all found a way to coexist peacefully and productively. My grandmother always used to say that good fences make good neighbors, and I suppose she was right. Building and mending fences can be difficult at best, and painful and frustrating at its worst. However, it allows each of us to secure a small space of our own to nurture and grow those things that give us nourishment and pleasure.
