A Crunchy Situation: Just a Little Picket Fence

A few posts back, I published some pictures of my 2013 garden. If you'll notice, there was no fence.

Please excuse my neighbor's awesome need for 45 cars.

There was no need for a fence. This year, the second anything had a leaf, we got a visitor.
A fuzzy, quiet, hopping, leaf-eating visitor. Little Bunny Foo Foo has a thing for tomato leaves, apparently. Where was Little Bunny Foo Foo last year? Well. This had to be handled.

It was time to build a fence. We were strapped for extra cash at the time, so my husband grabbed a roll of chicken wire and cut a couple 1x4s in half. Then he cut an angle at the end of each 1x4 so they were stakes. Then he hammered a stake at each corner of the garden, and just wrapped the chicken wire around the stakes. It was horrific - the chicken wire was floppy and... well, it was classy (not).

It really ups the class when you have toys strewn everywhere... geez.

I knew that was just a temporary solution, so I didn't fret too much. I could still bend over the fence to weed and harvest. But the problem remained. I wanted a sturdier and far more attractive fencing solution for my garden. Firstly because I hate rabbits when they're not food or pets. Secondly, because chickens apparently love spinach. Jerks.

My neighbors have had a pile of scrap wood on the side of their house from their remodel for like ever. I asked if I could have some of it, and they said sure! So, the mister and I cut the wood scraps into:

40 18" pickets,
Two two more of the larger stakes.
Four 10' 1x4s
four 5' 1x4s

I hammered the stakes into the ground in between the original stakes, so there was three stakes on either side.

I then predrilled and screwed in the longer pieces horizontally onto those six stakes.

Photographic evidence of that progress (like my bag-o-horse-crap-on-a-wagon?):

At this point, I got to use the staple gun - I took the chicken wire that we had on the original "fence," and stapled it along the inside of the fence. My husband followed me with the wire cutters and cut it down to size since the fence is only about 18" high and the chicken wire was something like three feet tall.

So I got the pneumatic nail gun and went. to. town. They're unevenly distributed, probably not straight, but ya know what, I like it. I considered making it look a little Tim Burton-y, but since the horizontal slats were so level, I figured wonky pickets would just look like I had been drunk.

After I put the pickets up and I was thoroughly sunburned, I put the rocks back (that were originally the perimeter) at the base of the fence, in case my neighbor's beagle puppy got out again. He's a digger. Nuff said.