Deer Fences for Vegetable Gardens: How to Build Them

The Basics (Typical Values)

• Small Garden Fences (100 feet long  or less): 7 to 7.5 foo height;  6-inch bottom fold; 1” x 1” black galvanized welded wire fencing or smaller opening size; round black galvanized steel posts with sleeves; post spacing 8 feet or less apart; optional corner or end braces; no tensioning or rodent barrier; gate 5 feet wide x 7 or 7.5 feet tall, depending on the height of the fence. Attach fencing with black stainless steel ties (about 1 tie per foot of post). Secure bottom fold to ground with kinked galvanized ground stakes (about 1 stake every 4 feet).
• Longer Garden Fences in low snow regions (20 inches or less per year): 8 foot height; 6-inch bottom fold (provided by rodent barrier); 8-foot black polypropylene fencing, 2” x 2’” mesh, 700 grade or stronger poly; round black galvanized steel posts with sleeves; post spacing up to 15 feet with tensioning otherwise one every 12 feet; brace posts for ends and corners; gate number and width your choice. Tensioning is recommended. Install a rodent barrier of metal fencing (one inch opening size or smaller) 2 feet tall minimum, mounting vertically on poly fencing with hog ring staples. Fold last 6 inches of rodent barrier outward and stake down with kinked galvanized ground stakes (about 1 every 4 feet).
• Longer Garden Fences in high-snow regions (over 20 inches per year): 7.5 foot height or taller; 6-inch bottom fold; 1” x 1” black galvanized welded wire fencing or poly fencing 2x2; round black galvanized steel posts with sleeves; post spacing 10 feet or less (without tensioning) or 12 feet (with tensioning); end and corner brace posts; add a rodent barrier as outlined above if needed; and number of gates of your choice. Attach fencing with black fence ties (about 1 tie per foot of post). Secure bottom fold to ground with kinked galvanized ground stakes (about 1 stake every 4 feet).

Introduction

Has your vegetable garden suffered deer damage to a point where you’re ready to build a fence? If so, you should know that’s a good idea. Certainly, it’s far better than trying a raft of half-measures (repellents, electric fences, noisemakers, water sprayers, and carefully spaced lines of twine) that sometimes work and sometimes don’t. Deer are large animals, and a single intrusion can do a lot of damage. So, building a fence makes sense.

You have a lot of choices. You need to decide whether to get plastic or metal fencing and what kind, whether to tension it or not, how far apart to space your posts, whether to remove the fence in the off-season, how wide to make the gate, and so forth. Here we explain how to decide those things.

Fences for Small Gardens

The Fencing Paradox: Let’s define a small garden as one with a circumference of 100 feet or less. That means the garden can be 25 x 25 feet or 20 x 30 feet and still qualify. In that case the deer fence can be relatively short (as low as 6 feet in most cases) and plastic fencing (professional grade polypropylene with a breaking strength of 650+ pounds per linear foot) would seem like a good choice.

The devil is in the details. Here’s the paradox: Plastic fencing can sag, so it needs tensioning to run straight with longer post spacing. But a tensioning system requires brace posts at the corners, and they’re expensive. And, if it weren’t for the tensioning system, the fence would be short enough so that brace posts would not be needed.

If you forego the brace posts and tensioning system, you’re saving a lot of money. That’s more than the difference between the price of our plastic fencing and that of our comparable black galvanized welded wire fencing, which needs no tensioning so long as the posts are not over 8 feet apart.

Furthermore, a plastic fence commonly needs a “rodent barrier.” This is a 2-foot strip or taller of wire fencing attached at the bottom of the plastic fencing to keep rabbits and woodchucks from gnawing holes in the plastic fencing – holes that deer can then enlarge to penetrate the fence. Obviously, if you get metal fencing to begin with, you don’t need this.

Adding all this up, it’s fair to conclude that for a short fence you should get welded wire fencing. The only remaining problem relates to height. Both our metal and plastic fencing come in widths of 6, 7.5, and 8 feet. You need 6 inches of fencing folded outward on the ground and staked down so that deer won’t nose under the fence. If you’re getting 6-foot wide welded wire fencing to begin with, the bottom fold will reduce the height of your fence to 5.5 feet. And while 6 feet may be a little iffy, 5.5 feet is not enough height to reliably keep out deer.

So go ahead, bite the bullet, and get a 7.5-foot roll of black welded wire fencing—planning to create a 7-foot fence or a 6-footer with a wide (18-inch) bottom fold. Either way you will save money, reduce maintenance, and get a product that lasts longer than a fence made correctly with comparable professional grade plastic deer fencing.

More Fencing Choices: We offer many kinds of plastic fencing. However, the choice usually comes down to our 700 and 800 grades—those with a breaking strength of 650+ and 750+ pounds per linear foot, respectively. That’s because the lower grades typically provide a little less strength than one would like, while the higher grades rival the cost of our metal fencing.

We also offer a wide choice in metal fencing. However, our black steel web fencing can sag and so requires tensioning, which tends to make it expensive for a small garden. Our black welded wire fencing (galvanized over the weld and coated evenly with black PVC) comes in various mesh sizes. Those that seem most suitable for deer fencing having a square mesh size of 1” x 1” (thinner wires, lower visibility) and 2” x 2” (thicker wires, slightly stronger, higher visibility). The prices of these products are comparable. We tend to favor the 1” mesh because the low visibility makes the fence fade into the background and also makes it harder for deer to see the top – and so makes them less inclined to jump.

The Fence Posts: If we reject really wonky choices like rebar and PVC pipe, there seem to be several choices that make sense.

Studded steel T-posts (in standard weights of 1.25, 1.33, and 1.5 pounds per foot) work but have a farm/ranch appearance that doesn’t look well at all sites. Be sure to get posts that are at least 2 feet longer than your fence is tall. In addition, T posts have great side to side strength – not great forward and back strength. We prefer round steel tubular posts for a fence to keep animals in or out because the strength is equal in all directions.

Wooden posts (4 x 4s or 6-inch rounds) appeal because they’re cheap. However, you’ll lose whatever you gain paying for lugging them about and installation. These posts need one third of their overall length in the ground for leverage (more on the corners) or below the frost line, whichever is deeper.

The posts we offer are round steel posts galvanized and given a black powder coat finish. They look well not only in vegetable gardens but also in suburban yard and estate settings. Their minimum useful estimated life is 20+ years.

These round posts have features that make them easy to install and remove. For starters they come with 2.5-foot drive sleeves. No ladders needed. Simply put the point of the sleeve where you want the post to go. Put our anvil (drive cap) in the open end of the sleeve. Hit the anvil with a hammer or 4-pound mallet (no sledgehammer needed) or gas powered post driver, until the sleeve is about an inch out of the ground. Remove the anvil and insert the post, which is now installed. That’s all there is to it.

Here's something more. After the post is inserted, tighten our patented set screw provided as part of the sleeve so that the post doesn’t rattle in the sleeve. Should you ever wish to remove the post, simply loosen the screw and pull the post out. It’s as simple as that. This is a real plus for people with small gardens who wish to first stabilize their posts and then remove the fence in the off-season—paving the way for tilling and soil preparation the next season.

Gates: Our gates come as easily assembled kits and they also use our ground sleeve system. Be sure to get one that is wider than any piece of heavy gear you will want to get through the fence. To make the fence rabbit-proof, overlap the metal fencing at the sides of the gate door and at the sides of the support posts, so that the fencing overlapping the posts and door just touches on both sides of the door when the gate is closed. Also, make sure that the gate opens over flat ground, and extend the fencing on the door all the way to the ground. That way there will be no small holes around the gate for rabbits to squeeze through. (Squeezing through small holes is their specialty.)

Fence Ties and Ground Stakes: For attaching hardware use fence ties (about one per foot of post) to attach the fencing to the posts and use our kinked galvanized ground stakes (one every 4 feet) to secure the bottom fold of fencing to the ground. Your fence is now complete. If you select tensioning as an option, posts will use post cable collars which hold and spool tension cable. Fencing then is attached with hog ring staples.

Longer Garden Fences

Undoing the Paradox: For larger vegetable gardens, where the fence will be over 100 feet long, you typically need corner and end brace posts whether you install tensioning or not. Here poly fencing can make more sense. That’s because you’re not saving anything on the brace posts. Furthermore, if your fence is south of the snow belt, the tensioning system allows you to install your posts up to 15 feet apart. That can save more than the tensioning system costs.

This means it’s worth exploring our website or requesting comparative quotes in order to tell what the relative costs are. Again, we would tend to favor the 800 or higher grades of plastic fencing and the black galvanized welded steel wire with 1” x 1” mesh as a rodent barrier. If you’re planning a longer fence (say 600 feet or more), keep in mind that the plastic fencing can require more maintenance and tends to last less time than comparable wire fence products.

Fence Height: For vegetable garden fences that aren’t short, there’s really no issue. You want a fence that is 7 to 8 feet tall. There will be a problem getting to 8 feet if you opt for welded wire, because of the need for a 6-inch bottom fold. However, there is in fact little practical difference between a 7.5-foot deer fence and an 8-footer.

Fence Posts: If your fence will be in a snow-prone area where the average annual snowfall is 20 inches or more, installing a tensioning system won’t save much on posts. That’s because you need to space your posts rather close together (not over 12 feet apart). However, in places with little or no snow a 15-foot spacing makes sense, and the savings in post cost can be significant.

Gates:Besides our 3 to 7-foot wide access gates suited to small gardens, we also offer wider driveway gates with one or two doors suited to admitting farming machinery and vehicles to large gardens.