In which we turn our hands to fencing

What do you do when you want to grow your own vegetables in true oncoming apocalypse¹ prepper style, but you have three TinySheep who eat literally everything they see even though they have more grass than they can shake a strawberry at?

You ringfence your vegetable garden, of course.

But how?

The last thing we wanted was a B&Q-style fence² because we are nothing if not rustic. But it turns out, rustic costs a ludicrous amount of money, as we discovered.

The fencing options

1. Basic-bish garden-centre picket fence. Pros: easy to just buy and bang into place. Cons: wouldn’t match our rusticity, boring, high cost considering we’d hate it.

2. Willow fedge. Pros: it’d look smashing and it would be a living barrier that would grow as we did. Cons: high cost and the TinySheep would definitely eat it.

3. Chicken wire. Pros: we’ve got tons of chicken wire and a few fence posts. Sturdy. Easy to put up. Cons: ugly.

4. Moat. Pros: super fun and we could have a drawbridge to the greenhouse. Great for newts and frogs. Cons: requires a ludicrous amount of digging, lining, and water. Mosquito breeding ground.

5. Hazel fence. Pros: our woods are full of hazel coppices. We’d be absolutely carbon neutral. Builds our woodland management skills. Good exercise. Very pretty and rustic. Costs zero (0) pounds. Cons: None. This is a plan with no drawbacks.

Before we settled on hazel from our own woodland, though, because we both forgot we had hazel coppices in our woodland, we did some research and nearly choked on our crumpets.

A bundle of 10 x 1-inch diameter hazel pole, about 3 metres long, costs £60.

Yes, that’s SIXTY ENGLISH POUNDS.

We did some sums and quickly realised that our fence alone would cost well over £800 (we stopped doing sums at that point). That’s just silly.

Then we remembered we lived on a patch of land with our own hazel woods, and the decision was made. Off we went for a wander around.

Our approach to doing things like this takes one of three courses:

1. Just fling ourselves at it willy nilly, with nary a thought for instructions, how-tos, or any kind of expertise, and see what happens. More often than not, it’s (eventually) a success.

2. Pay someone else to do it (absolute last resort for fiscal and also stubborness reasons).

3. Research ourselves to a standstill, procrastinate for weeks, then fling ourselves at it willy nilly.

In the case of our besieged vegetable garden, we plopped for option 3.

How to make a hazel fence

The posts

Monty Don told me you’re supposed to use chestnut trunks for the fence uprights because it’s very rot-resistant, but we have no chestnut and no chill, so we just cut some big fat hazel trunks down and chopped them into 1.5 m lengths.

Then we sharpened the points with an axe, borrowed a post knocker from a neighbour, and banged them into the ground at approximately 2 m intervals. We’ll take the tops off and level them when we’ve finished the fence.

After that, we needed slimmer versions of the posts to go in between, to provide structure for the weaving. Same process, just easier to knock them into the ground.

The lopping

Next, we grabbed the loppers and a hand axe and ventured into the woods in search of suitable coppices.

We were after long, straight-ish hazel whips, the fattest end of which should be no larger than 5cm and no smaller than 2.5cm. Any fatter and they’re too hard to weave; any thinner and they’re not really doing anything structurally helpful.

I lopped ‘em off the mother tree, while Joe used the axe to smooth off the side shoots and smaller branches.

Then we thanked our trees and told them we love them (because we do) and moved onto the next ones.

We haven’t counted them all but I reckon we got a couple of hundred hazels poles out of our woods, and next year we’ll have more. Coppicing is really cool and a very sustainable way of producing useful wood.

The weaving

Dragging them back to the veg garden was hard work and we now begin to see why hazel poles are so expensive. Still not shelling out 60 notes for 10 of ‘em though, that’s daft.³

Once there, we started a careful selection process:

1. Choose a sturdy long whip, start at a corner or end, and weave it in and out of the posts until you run out of whip.

2. Choose another sturdy long whip, start at the opposite end, and weave back.

3. Repeat, making sure each successive whip starts on the other side.

4. Do the perpendicular fence at the same time, so you weave the two sides together at the corner.

5. If you spot a weak area in the middle, start a weave with a fat end in the middle to strengthen it.

6. Twist the hazel as you bend it so it doesn’t snap.

7. Keep going until you’re sure your TinySheep can’t jump over it.

It looks amazing. We’re really proud of it and I keep walking up to it and touching it and feeling like my heart will burst out of my chest, Alien-stylee because my god there are few things more satisfying than making something in nature with your two hands, that is both useful and beautiful.

The gate

The gate is currently an old pallet, because we haven’t made one yet, but we will do. That’s this weekend’s plan.

The good news, though, is that the fence is low enough for us to climb over to do the gardening, and high enough that the TinySheep haven’t even tried to leap it. Although there isn’t much worth eating in there yet, so we’ll see how that goes…

Touch grass

I’ve spent a lot of time outside lately, running or hiking or growing vegetables or building hazel fences, and almost no time on social media, and my mental health has vastly improved.

“Touch grass” is a bit of a snarky internet meme, but it’s good advice.

If the world feels like too much — because spoiler alert, the world is too much right now, there are literal fascists rising around the world and it would be brilliant if anyone anywhere had ever learned a single goddam lesson from history — then please, turn off all the bad news and go outside.

Look at the sky.

Look at the growing things.

Plant a vegetable seed and marvel that from that seed — that little inert-seeming nub — will grow a plant that will bear food that you can actually eat. You can EAT it. How COOL is that?

There is more good in the world than bad, and we can spread it by not listening to hatred and propaganda, and instead growing some food and offering it to someone who needs it or wants it or looks angry or hungry or simply confused.

And maybe have a go at building a hazel fence.

Because that is a satisfying and wonderful thing to do.

1  Having a zombie plan no longer sounds like such a weird thing to do in 2025, does it?

2  Absolutely no shade to B&Q fence havers, it’s just not our thang.

3  Seriously considering selling expensive hazel poles to yuppies next year. Are yuppies still a thing? Whatever the 2026 equivalent is, anyway.