Ha ha fence

Julia Schmoyer II wrote:This is cool to see. I think many jumping animals need a particular "runway" or visual clearance in order to make the jump, and this might just trick the deer's instinctual sense of physics into believing it's not possible to make the jump. Out here in Georgia, people talk about using a 2-fence system - installing 2 parallel fences about 4 ft apart. The deer can figure out how to clear one fence, but the small in-between space makes them think twice because they wouldn't be able to position themselves to clear the second one.

We use this two fence system and it works well.  We've never had a deer get in, or a hawk steal a chicken.  It was from an old article in Mother Earth News.  The deer don't have depth perception so they cannot judge the distance between the two fences.  Ours is about 10' apart.  The hawks don't like to fly in a corridor.  Our chicken coop is at one end and the chickens run between the fences catching  bugs before they get to the garden.  The inside fence keeps the chickens out of the garden.  Best thing we've ever done.  I think I posted a pic of it somewhere here several years ago.

Bonnie, can you share the approximate dimensions of the garden and fences?  What type of fence is it?

I currently have a large (175' x 200') garden that I inherited.  I had great success with a 3D electric fence (two wires on the inside and a 3rd wire 4ft away in the middle) for deer, but I'm struggling with grass on the edges and other animals like ground hogs.

I don't have chickens currently, but had great success with them keep areas cleared in the past.

Eino Kenttä wrote:Cool technique! I've seen references to this, but never understood what a ha-ha was... Don't think they've ever been used in my part of the world.

David Wieringa wrote:

Bonnie, can you share the approximate dimensions of the garden and fences?  What type of fence is it?

I currently have a large (175' x 200') garden that I inherited.  I had great success with a 3D electric fence (two wires on the inside and a 3rd wire 4ft away in the middle) for deer, but I'm struggling with grass on the edges and other animals like ground hogs.

I don't have chickens currently, but had great success with them keep areas cleared in the past.

I'm not Bonnie, but below is a link to a great video by Tom Bartells of growfoodwell.com explaining and showing the "psychological deer fence" in detail. I learned about it from him many years ago, and let's just say that I was very excited to learn about such an effective and inexpensive method of deer fecning. In another video that he has on his actual site, he also mentions putting chicken wire fencing around the bottom of the outside fence to keep rabbits and other smaller mammals out. I'll just link both, they're about the same fence, but two is better than one sometimes.

On youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CL4vX4N_dyg

A different video about the same fence by the same person, done a few years before the above one with a couple of other bits of information about it (from the page on his websire https://growfoodwell.com/build-a-deer-fence/:
https://gfwvideos42014.s3.amazonaws.com/deerfence.mp4?_=1

Peter George wrote:
Presumably, ha-has weren't used in Norway for the same reasons they weren't used in my part of Canada. I call reason #1: "Exposed bedrock." Reason #2 is perhaps because neither Norway or Canada were "blessed" with as many "great families" as England with their retinues of great numbers of land-slaves.
 If I was to attempt a modern ha-ha, I'd enslave a mechanical excavator or 'dozer and build a relatively shallow sloped ditch COMBINED with a just-high-enough fence ("aha-ha") to repel the hordes of marauding deer or attacking orcs. But because soil is endangered species where I live, I used wire and artfully piled stacks of stones.

Glenn Herbert wrote:"Exposed bedrock" can mean many things depending on the type of rock. Some like shale might be fairly easy to quarry or pull up chunks, while others like granite would be totally impractical to modify without specialist tools and knowledge... and a whole lot of energy :)