Grateful Dead Hedge

Susan Doyon wrote:Ross Thank you for posting the Tudor video . loved it .
It is a great subject and thread , as so many of us have more need for fence than funds to build them .

Up here in Massachusetts we have loads of invasive wild rose and autumn olive I wonder if they could be moved and pruned into a proper hedge

Thank you, Susan. there is 6 episodes in that series and something to learn in each. Then They also do a bunch of other series. My favorite is, Wartime Farm. There is also Edwardian Farm and I think, Victorian Farm. I think they did one on castles as well but dont quote me on that.

thank you I will try to find them later

Roberto pokachinni wrote:

It looks like a pack rat super highway. How do you control vermin?

It would also be a martin haven, a weasel paradise... snakes... plenty of predators love that sort of place.

A couple of Rat Terriers or Jack Russels would be in doggy heaven and soon have that little problem under control if it developed to an unmanageable extent. A living hedge wouldn't keep cows in but a combo of living and dead hedge would. They don't tend to push through what they can't see through. Ross isn't building his hedge next to the buildings so I don't think it much of an issue regardless. Critters have got to live some where and they all have their places in the scheme of things.

I have some old mesh fencing with mature 20 foot brush growing through it. Some of sections of wire are on the ground and grown over from lack of maintenance over the last 50 years. I don't want to cut the brush out to clear old rusty wire on the ground and then have a bare spot in the living brush and the cows track those spots down pretty quickly. I don't know why I didn't think of dead hedging those missing wire sections, but its the solution to the problem. Some dead hedging stuffed in the living hedge that I already have. Who would have thunk it?

I use them quite a lot. After trying other alternatives for keeping goats out of areas, I started to conclude that this, the most popular method of fencing in the area was not necessarily the most secure (which was concrete posts, chain link and barbed wire), but by far the most economical in terms of money and labour.

Laying hedges has the disadvantage in goat country that goats (and deer) love to eat buds off of trees up to around 1.5 meters from the ground. Laying a tree horizontally is turning it into a goat snack and with regular browsing it may well die, or at least it will probably not grow in well enough to make a dense hedge....unless you pile brush over it.

I still lay hedges in areas which are protected from goats by other fences as part of a long term plan, so that goats or other animals can be allowed into these areas periodically in future.

I cut hawthorns or other not so valuable trees which happen to be where I want fences at around 1.5 meters, and then pile the spiky brush around the base of the trees along the line of the planned hedge. Where there aren't trees I use stakes and brush. The trees coppice and grow denser, if they aren't cut, they grow tall and make a canopy, while remaining fairly open at ground level.

Eventually, if you wait long enough and pile more brush on periodically, brambles and small trees will start to colonise the hedge. Throwing seeds of desirable species in may speed this up a bit.

I have never found lack of brush to be a problem. A mistake I made early on was to use small twigs and brush for firewood, believing that this frugality would reduce the need to cut more trees and thus protect the forest. In some cases this can be good, but it may actually be better for the forest to cut another mature tree, use only the biggest boughs, and use the remaining brush to protect seedlings, maintain moisture and humus, establish hedges etc. Pollarding is a very good idea in places with browsing animals such as goats or deer, as this allows trees to produce new buds out of reach of the browsers.

Raye Beasley wrote: A living hedge wouldn't keep cows in but a combo of living and dead hedge would.

Living hedges (properly laid) have kept cows in for centuries.....obviously not the same cows, they would be pretty old

Lol

I liked the Tudor video, too. Worth noticing the difference between the experienced master and the novice actors.

"With practice, two people can erect 20m a day"...

That's a bit daunting, but much better than my 2 days to complete 6 feet of woven wicker hurdle.

I think these biodegradable fences are a promising idea for keeping deer, herds, etc. off the new food forest trees long enough for the leaders to get above browse height, and maybe to keep critters away from the bark of the trunks if you have harsh winters.
We've seen currants survive in the middle of a slash pile, and along regular fencelines, where the meadow is heavily browsed everywhere else. I've experimented with using them to re-establish aspen; nasty dry years for it, but I will continue to try as we rehabilitate the pond. I imagine even a decent brush pile could shorten the length of portable fence you need to construct - split the difference between cash and labor investment.

We saw thorn fences in Morocco, there was a big difference between "street" fence (to help people herding animals keep them out of the neighbors' way, just kind of a rough tumbleweed pile anywhere from knee-high to shoulder-high), and "garden" fence (the lushest garden I saw also had the sturdiest gate, and the fence was reinforced with cane, poles, thorn, a whole mixed lot of fairly stout panels). Prized fruit trees were even better protected: the favorite trees and vines were grown inside the courtyard, "in the kitchen" as it were, in park-like curbed circles of dirt where dish-water and wash-water could be poured liberally over their feet. The courtyard would include all the various rooms of the household (kitchen, sleeping quarters, guest room, loo, storage or spare rooms), and a continuous adobe wall with one or two doorways out into the street and back garden. Someone was usually home to shoo the dogs and donkeys out of the courtyard; and there were some stout gates but seemed to be rarely used in daytime.

In Morocco, aside from the walled courtyards, there were a lot fewer fences than here.

They would ride or lead donkeys around, then hobble them and leave them somewhere shady while they did their errands or work day or whatever. Some large farms have "donkey parking" areas where the hobbled animals keep each other company, near their packs. They seem somewhat trainable, or perhaps evolved to a certain level of patience with this.
Large animals would be kept in small pens (a little larger than we'd consider a stall), or tied up. They would be walked down to water, or to better grazing, by one person leading a whole string of animals once or twice a day.

In the US, I've seen portable fences used by shepherds to control mob grazing even on college campuses - sometimes with a guardian dog. Modern ones are often electric (or at least, electrified for training), but people used to pen sheep (for vet inspection, sales, etc) with portable "corrals" of lattice or hurdles. For goats and such, for example when using them to 'mow' blackberry patches or other invasive weeds, the more common method seems to be to tether them. It still takes human attention to un-tangle them periodically, but at least they only make trouble for themselves, not the rest of the gardens.
I haven't raised pigs, but they're rumored to be intelligent; I wonder if you could train one to tolerate a tether-cable and harness if you made sure it got access to its favorite treats that way. They are also rumored to be obstinate and greedy; maybe a masonry-walled garden would be a better strategy than a "pig pasture."
A hedging manual I borrowed from a friend described ditches, ditch-and-dike systems, and partial walls used in combination with hedges, depending on what kind of animal was to be fenced in. In areas with fewer good hedge trees, they might combine a dead hedge with a low stone wall as the base. There were also strategies for laying the hedge in a certain direction so that the browsing animals would not eat through the base of the tree bark (also a function of the ditches). Zoo enclosures often use a combination of courtesy fence (on the people side) and steep ditches (on the large animal side); I think it's called a "boma" if I remember right? I think the English version is called a "haha," a fence that is a sunken ditch so it isn't obvious looking across the landscape.

If you are really thinking about living on the land and not buying industrial stuff, whether historically or in a hypothetical post-industrial future, then fencing every beastie's pasture starts to seem like a lot of extra expense or work. Enough fence on a 5-year renewal cycle, and you have a full-time, responsible adult doing fence repair (assuming that skill and dedication improve the longevity of the results). Having one or two kids act as 'herders' starts to make a lot more sense than fencing the entire Western USA.

Traditional societies also were a lot less concentrated, and ate more wild game than livestock (even in cities like New York and London, hunters supplied much of the table meat). So the chances of your stray critter eating its way through someone else's prize X was lower, and the number of livestock per person that you'd expect to keep might be lower too. And the need to defend against predators (or for that matter, thieves), and the relatively lower price of labor compared with manufactured materials, all added up to a greater incentive to watch your critters if you wanted to keep them. For large, productive herds, you can afford to keep hired men, and maybe even mount them on horses (or feed them well enough to ensure stout legs, and well-trained dogs).
When the wilderness has its own space and provides some of your seasonal food, you can concentrate on fencing in the kitchen garden (zone 1 or 1 and 2), use guardian animals and tethering and training for biddable or small livestock, and keep larger stock penned in a smaller enclosure unless you have enough of it to justify the hire of a herdsman. Keeping just a few large animals (horse, donkeys, cattle, big pigs) is either part of a social contract, or a hobby that you pay for in fencing and feed costs.

Some reading on the "commons" recently suggested that many English and European villages had standing arrangements to make the best use of social support and labor. They would alternate between individual care of animals (night and milking times, no economies of scale in hand-milking until they invented machines), then you'd use economies of scale by having one or two herdsmen take everyone's animals out to graze. Animals that are driven past all the gardens don't have as much time to puzzle out a fence. The rest of the village adults would go about their daily business without watching a single animal 24/7.

If you are trying to be a self-sufficient rancher with no extra help, it's going to take herculean dedication.
The social structures that go along with nature-based herd management are key. In areas with denser populations, a village and its herdsman and goose girl. In areas with sparse population, you have fierce nomadic herdsmen (cowboys, caballeros, Masai cattlemen, Mongolian families) who camp out with the beasts. The whole family, or a large part of its male population, may move seasonally with the herds.

Our situation in American rural life is not traditional. We have legal obligations to fence certain areas, control invasive weeds, etc. We have enough neighbors that someone is bound to complain when the beasts get out, but not enough social ties to cooperatively manage our beasts. It's all one-man-kingdoms, which are only feasible with trucks and fences and other industrial artifacts.

So for it to work in some contexts of American culture, you'd almost need to achieve something comparable to hog panel or barbed wire. Maybe a little better, as people would assume the problem was your fence if things went wrong (where if it was barbed wire, they'd assume the problem was the stupid cow or teenagers that spooked it or whatever).

But for anyone managing a place that has more flexibility in its arrangements, and friendlier neighbor relations, I'd suggest re-thinking your fencing strategies and looking into what people in similar climates did historically.

You could manage the fire aspect with stone fence breaks, maybe where you'd want permanent gates or stiles. (Britain has historical public walks where everyone is entitled to cross the lands, too, unlike most of America; constructing convenient fence-crossings that would let people pass without letting animals escape become its own art). And while our climate would definitely see complete combustion of brush fences when the wild fires came through (maybe every 10 to 20 years on average?), you could also see this as a fail-safe: in case of fire, the animals will be freed (if they have enough brains to find the gap in the fence). Even if they panic and just charge the fence on the far side, the idea of a fence that a determined animal can break through in an emergency is not all bad. Like horse-ties that can always be popped loose in a panic, or hobbles that are weak enough to break if the animal is being attacked.
Giving the animal a little more control of its fate in an emergency means relying on training, good living conditions, and mutual understanding to keep them in their proper place. The tether, hobble, or fence becomes a firm request, rather than a complete physical barrier. I suspect we'd need to get the right breeds of livestock guardian animals, and learn to train them better, but it can be done.

I think permaculture farmers are better educated and better placed than most, to figure it out.

-Erica W

Pictures of a few elements I noticed in Morocco - they use very simple thorn "fedges", dead brush, and thorny plants like jujube, acacia, prickly pear, along with constructed sections of cane, wire, wood, stone, adobe, or simple gates of wood, iron, corrugated roofing tin.

I'm including a lot of ideas beyond the fence itself. Like the plastered haystacks - hay and chaff would be covered in an earth or earth-dung plaster, to be opened up when needed. Sometimes with plastic under the plaster, or baled hay stacked to make a catenate roof-like shape.

Because it's not just swapping out a fence - it's a system. They use fences differently than we do, as aids for drovers.
And they seem to have a lot more animals that are not "controlled" in the same way - dogs are reviled and not trained or cared for, but will attach themselves to a household. I saw several donkeys with "homeschooling" colts, the colt would follow Mama around while she was being used to carry things or whatever. Animals that were not a regular part of the household (an ox newly bought for slaughter) would be tied to something, or penned up. Expensive animals would be penned up when not in use, or supervised when led out to graze or drink.

I am sure there were a lot of nuances I didn't catch - neighbor problems when someones beasts did stray or break through fences, or maybe if your animal strayed someone would just eat it rather than complain. And there were certainly a lot of dusty bare spots where the paths converged in public areas, including some badly eroded old tree-roots or washed-out creek beds. The paths themselves appeared to be eroded down several feet compared with the height of the protected thorny fence base. The thorns came loose, or the tree dropped new ones; they snagged on your clothing; you picked them up; you put them back on the fence somewhere. The animal grabbed a mouthful of tree on its way by, got a smack, moved along while still chewing. Even a rope gate is enough to keep a herded animal from straying, if it knows where it's supposed to be going and is looking forward to being there.

It just seemed to be such an old accustomed relationship that everyone involved, including the animals, expected it to work as it did. So it worked.
I don't know how you'd go about creating that in a modern American rural county; but it might be possible to try the experiment within an interested small town or intentional community.

So quick efficient fencing for/against animals... While the dead hedge idea can work in certain conditions, why wouldn't good old solar electric fence fit the bill?

Andras Hajdu wrote:So quick efficient fencing for/against animals... While the dead hedge idea can work in certain conditions, why wouldn't good old solar electric fence fit the bill?

Well, Yes. I plan on using that as well this year....but...that is not what this about. I am educating myself while teaching others. This is an issue many people will face in the near future. When purchased or financed materials are no longer affordable at any price.

Example. We are in a commodities crash at the moment. Prices for manufactured goods are dropping rapidly. Doesn't that sound good? Not if your job is dependent on resource extraction, manufacturing, trade or servicing people working in those industries. Mass unemployment.

So the words to remember are- "Not affordable at any price"

That is why I try to solve these little problems.

In the words of John Michael Greer, "Collapse Now. Avoid the Rush"

AKA "Collapse now and beat the rush!"

[Edit: Doh! Ross, you edited that last line in while I was thumb-typing this!]

More seriously, permaculture cuts across the whole economic spectrum. At one end we got rich men with huge snorting excavators carving out fantastical paradises to be planted with ten thousand purchased trees. At the other we have modern peasants trying to figure out old (and new!) ways to survive and thrive with no money at all. I recognize and honor the helpful spirit that informs these suggestions, but when someone from further along the spectrum toward "snorting excavators" says "Wouldn't it be easier, faster, or more efficient to just do [something more expensive]?" it's not actually all that helpful.

Great minds think alike.

On that note, Its above freezing so I am back out there cutting and dragging brush. I'ld hate to be doing this job without a chainsaw. That is another reason I will put a lot of effort into coppicing. Eventually we have to do this without a chainsaw.

Erica Wisner wrote:Our situation in American rural life is not traditional. We have legal obligations to fence certain areas, control invasive weeds, etc. We have enough neighbors that someone is bound to complain when the beasts get out, but not enough social ties to cooperatively manage our beasts. It's all one-man-kingdoms, which are only feasible with trucks and fences and other industrial artifacts.

Erica I really want to thank you for that pair of posts (with pictures!) that delve so deeply into the social philosophy of fences. I gestured at this very lightly and semi-ignorantly up thread, when I made my off-topic (because I hadn't figured out how to integrate it with the topic as you have) comment about using kids as herder-labor as a substitute for fencing. Your observations from a land where fencing and herding solutions are integrated in a complex social matrix of land use expectations and architectural accommodations are useful and fascinating.

Your one paragraph I've quoted puts me in mind of that so-American aphorism "good fences make good neighbors." I don't think that line would make much sense in the Morocco you have described. I just went back and re-read Frost's "Mending Wall" (from which that aphorism comes) for the first time since college, and in the context of this thread I think it has an awful lot to say:

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Ross Raven wrote: ... I can imagine chickens with a bit of flight treating it more like a landscape feature (hey, let's go perch on that funny ridge)...

Ha, my wife thought it would be cool to raise some Icelandic Chickens, have a movable coop and movable 3' electric fence to keep predators at bay... Instead of flying over the fence, the chickens fly 8 feet straight up to the top of the coop roof, then fly off the other side when they want to get in or out of the fence.

Roberto pokachinni wrote:

It looks like a pack rat super highway. How do you control vermin?

It would also be a martin haven, a weasel paradise... snakes... plenty of predators love that sort of place.

Rabbits and pheasants moved right in. Its driving my dogs crazy. No way they can get through this. A bit more work and the Coy Wolves have no chance either. Ill try to bring the board pigs into it the next snow melt. Im alittle past the half way point on the job but it will keep the pigs in at this point, supervised, while I keep adding. I am a bit behind in photos.

For those that enjoyed Tudor Farm, I found this a few days ago. I think it is the inspiration for Tudor farm before Ruth, Peter and Tom became famous. It makes me feel like a wimp just watching them and feeling guilty because I am watching them instead of doing...

Tales From The Green Valley-

True story of the day. We are doing this in northern Nova Scotia. Like any farming community in the middle of BF nowhere, its a deeply religious area. Somehow, that is Buddhism. LOL

Soooo. The former director of the local Buddhist community was at our place today to chat with Mrs C5 about the feasibility of a local food hub. (Good luck with that). For context, I have to point out....German Buddhist. I told him to check out my dead hedge when he was leaving.

He rolled buy to where I was working. Appon seeing it, he replied, Oh. This is just like how they do t in Europe.

LOL. I told him about the multiple feedback loops I was learning while doing it. Opening up the area saves the dying trees. Cutting new arias produces future coppice for future wattle...and hand cuttable firewood once chainsaws are done. Once I bring in the pigs, they will deep till the shit out of the place, while getting in last minute protein for pregnant porkers from worms and the like. Once it is ubber tilled buy the pigs, I can yank out the roots from softened dirt of trees I dont want...and they will eventually eat every single apple that hits the ground, keeping any apple worms from being able to hibernate back into the soil, producing longer lasting apples to feed the pigs longer into the winter. Anything they eat will get pooped out into better fertiliser...and they will clear out the undergrowth so we pick fruit easier. More sun gets to the coppice fore faster growth. Better health for the trees because it dissuades woodpeckers feeding on dying trees. Two years from now, I hayseed so the topsoil doesn't wash away and the pigs only visit for apples but not to till. The hedge is a medium for new growing plants to become a living hedge for once I am old or dead.

Buddhist dude was impressed. I wanted to ask him...If I trip in the forest and land on my face cursing a blue streak...but there is no one around to notice...do I make a sound

LOL! Well played, Ross Raven, well played : )

Im a bit too beat to write anything charming....But, TA-DA! Today was the first day the pigs could be brought in...while supervised and I continued to add material.

I'll ad an aftershot of a previous photo. Then I will give a shot of the nightmare area that is about to become my new coppice farm once I clear it out

And here is some size context photos. It's more than a month into it but its not like I worked on it every day or even for full days. This is what one man with a chainsaw and a fence hole digger can do. Albeit, a slightly obsessive compulsive person.A person with more time than money. I should add that I am around fifty and a heavy smoker.

We are only at about the half way point. The absolute minimum. Now I have to pack much more bulk into it and add twice as many fence posts...and a gate.

then we can get to planting the live stuff on the edges

A rockstar performance, Ross. Very inspirational!

I imagine that a guy (or gal) could set up a base layer with the posts in the spring/summer/fall, and then putter on it all winter, thus making use of this 'slower' time of the year to get that height and volume ratios up high and thick enough for jumping ungulates and predatious diggers to be thwarted.

Here are some pictures of mine from early spring. I ah happy to report that some of the sycamore posts have taken root and survived. My experience with sweet gum is that they will leaf out well but don't have a good chance of surviving into the following year. I have many seedlings that I pulled up from the garden that were planted under the hedge. these are doing well as they grow through the hedge. I am very hopeful that the birds will bring mulberries, as this is something that we lack (surprisingly).

I guess I build dead dams then. I pile them at the edge of where the slopes begin so that whatever gets disturbed by by clearing of land, will get caught rather than wash down to the neighbor's bottom land. At some point, I plan to do some rocks walls and terrace things but that's a long term, time consuming task so in the meantime, piles of brush and logs that aren't good enough for firewood get piled in those places.

Yes, John! It's almost always good to put stuff on contour.

Our new "Dead Hedge" under construction. Windbreak, snow & dust catcher, bird/mammal/insect habitat, soil creator & fungus booster, and more... Areas to the right of photo are poor pasture with so little soil there's swaths of exposed bedrock. Some hedge posts are re-bar pinned into solid bedrock due to total lack of soil!, Otherwise we'd hugel it. It'll be the east half of a sun trap, too. There'll be a shallow-soiled perennial shrub bed parallel with it leeward. Already seen: 4 species of birds on/in it never seen there before. They can plant the fodder shrubs in it!

A dead hedge is something I've been considering. But I didn't want to be putting up posts using what I can use for firewood. So I was thinking about a wattle fence. But I could make two wattle fences and dead wood between them. That would solve my problem of not being able to have habitat piles. The fence would be barrier and small mammal/bird habitat.

I think if I do do this thing, I'm going to back it up by planting a living hedge in and adjacent to it.  We've got a bunch of thorny stuff that wants to grow here; the only reason I haven't done living hedges 'ere now is the long lead time before they are functional.  But planting osage orange and honey locust and willow and mulberry and hackberry along a dead hedge seems like a reasonable way to get to a permanent living and fodder-producing fence, especially if some of the trees supporting the dead hedge continue to grow and produce coppice (well, more like pollard actually) material for refreshing it.  Adding to the dead hedge doesn't seem like much of a burden when I am actively growing and clearing and maintaining the land in its vicinity; there will always be brush that needs to go somewhere.  But I like the idea that by the time I get to that certain age when I'm not going to be cutting brush, I might have a living hedgerow that won't need as much attention.

Ross Raven wrote:

Dead hedges can naturally turn into live hedges planted by birds that nest in them. I saw an example of a 10 year old dead hedge that had become a fully established natural hedge in Switzerland.

In the message above, my part and the quoted part somehow got inversed.

Peter, that is a beautiful creation!

It's a dead hedge, or it's an early stage living hedge, or it's a barbed wire fence (at this stage.)   Pick a word, any word.

What it is, is a low dollar cost deer-stopper.  It's significantly more labor than putting up purchased woven steel fence, unless the line you want to fence is mostly already a thicket you'd have to clear anyways in order to put up a fence there.



The live part of this one is currently cherry laurel, which is not ideal as the deer like to eat its shoots and it does not have thorns.  The cherry laurel thicket was about 15' wide and as tall in some places, most the way down the line in the photo (and was mostly passable to deer.)

This barrier protects the blackberries, which also need deer protection to start if you are going to grow them into a living fence.  These blackberries are going into their second year and are hardly visible in the photo but they are planted ever 2-3' at the base of this deer-stopper...the soil and water conditions are so poor at this location that even the "aggressive and invasive" erect blackberry needs 5+ years to grow into a barrier a deer won't want to mess with (and that's if you fork and fertilize and it is not grazed.)

The dead hedge part of this one is blackberry canes, oak limbs, and witch hazel limbs.   They make for a nasty tangled mesh a deer won't much try to wade through, and you don't have to do any weaving.  Just kinda prop them up mostly erect if you can, with the thick end of the limb on the ground.

A big buck all jacked up on April growth will out of curiosity jump a 6 foot barrier 3 feet in width here, if it can see it's landing zone.  This hedge is mostly 4.5' to 5' tall.  But it stops the big buck because it's mostly 4 ft or more wide, and there is a single line of barbed wire run through the area they would have to pass through on the way down, if they attempted to jump it.

1320 foot of barbed wire is $75, it lasts 15+ years if not buried (even in this climate) and it can be used repeatedly to establish a living fence.  Only problem is, it's slow and thorny AF to thread a line of barbed wire out of a blackberry hedge that has grown around it.  But it can be done and it's a 1 time thing, and then living fence for life with a bit of maintenance, and barbed wire can be used to establish a new hedge elsewhere.  Even though a 6' barrier is only 133% the height of a 4.5' barrier, making a brush hedge 6' tall needs something like 50% more brush and labor than a 4.5' one, and it tends to collapse faster.  $75 per 1320 feet of barrier at -50% labor investment that can be used 15+ years?  SOLD

Deer do get through the "just enough" fencing method a few times in its preliminary stages, except they only have to land on the barbed wire 1 time, and they will not attempt it again.   Now and then, there will be a hole blasted through such a dead hedge where a deer misjudged and wiped out trying to clear it.  Also, you can use a little observation to know the weak spot they use to jump through if they are, and (I imagine) pretty easily snare a deer.   A person can definately set a scrap ~7ft section of 4' woven fence horizontally and suspended 3 feet off the ground in the landing zone.  One time I was chasing the deer out of one paddock and I saw it jump into the horizontal suspended section of woven fence.  It looked like it might have broken its neck on the botched landing, but it rolled over and got up and ran for its life, with the fence section still hooked on its hind leg.  I had to go like 100 yards into the next property to retrieve my trap  (that deer was never seen again.)

A stretch of former dead hedge, 6 years later.




Best of luck dealing with the deer.

Inspired by this thread, I took all the dead branches that I trimmed off the pine trees and started piling them along the property line. It makes a nice visual barrier (for the kids, and kinda for the dog), but it's breaking down pretty quickly, and much more quickly than my stand of trees will keep up with. I'll keep adding to it as I go, but I expect I'll be installing steel fences for most of the property, and working on live hedges to replace them eventually.