The lettuce was fine on Sunday evening. By Monday the row was chewed to the crowns and the bird netting lay flat across the bed, still stapled to two of its four stakes. The pattern is common enough that the fence companies greenwich ct homeowners call every April spend a good share of spring on vegetable beds alone. Here is the argument stated plainly: netting buys one season, and an installed fence sized for the pressure actually on the lot ends the problem instead of postponing it. Nobody enjoys hearing that in April with seedlings already hardening off.
Netting Looks Like A Fence Until Deer Lean
Mesh works on the animals it was designed for. Robins, and the squirrel that takes one bite out of every tomato. A whitetail is a 140-pound animal that leans into an obstacle before it decides anything, and plastic mesh on hardware-store stakes gives way under that weight. Groundhogs skip the argument entirely and go under. By August, what started as a barrier is a sagging net that deer treat as a suggestion.
Ten years ago the math was easier to shrug off. A roll of mesh, a bundle of stakes, call it forty dollars and a Saturday, repeated every second spring. Materials no longer sit still like that. A lumber price roundup from Accio, tracking softwood’s climb from $545.50 per 1,000 board feet in November 2025 to roughly $872 per 1,000 board feet by January 2026, points at tight sawmill supply alongside higher logging and transportation costs, which is the same pressure sitting behind the price of a cedar post. Deferring the permanent fix used to be close to free. Now the yearly patch job competes with a rising number on the real thing, and it still loses vegetables.
Height And Buried Edges Decide The Outcome
Height is the part homeowners underestimate. A deer clears a four-foot fence without breaking stride, and on a wooded lot with cover on three sides it will. What turns up job after job on these Greenwich properties is a fence tall enough to look serious and short enough to be irrelevant, usually about five feet, usually put in by the homeowner the previous spring. Where pressure runs from April to first frost, the installers working these lots stop pretending anything under eight feet is a deer fence. The other half of the equation sits at ground level, because rabbits and groundhogs do not jump at all. A bottom edge buried six inches, or flared outward a foot and pinned flat, closes the route they actually use. The bottom six inches of a garden fence decide more outcomes than the top six feet. Skip either half and you have paid for something that only works on birds.
Then there is the gate. Ask the fence companies greenwich ct gardeners actually rehire what fails first, and the answer is almost never the fence itself. A gate that sags half an inch by its second summer leaves a gap a rabbit walks through, and a latch that needs a shove gets propped open in July when you are carrying two harvest baskets and a hose. Self-closing hardware costs more up front. It also removes the one failure mode that no amount of fence height compensates for.
Run the arithmetic on that 900-square-foot bed as a hypothetical. Thirty by thirty is 120 linear feet of perimeter, and say installed garden fencing at a serious height lands somewhere around $30 to $45 a foot depending on material and terrain, which puts the job in the neighborhood of $3,600 to $5,400 with a gate hung properly. Against that, put netting and stakes at maybe $120 a year, plus replacement seedlings, plus two Saturdays you were not planning to spend. Those dollar figures are illustrative rather than a quote, and terrain moves them. What is not hypothetical is the direction of travel: one of those numbers ends, and the other repeats until you stop gardening.
One Install Ends The Yearly Patch Job
A fence installed once changes what spring looks like. The beds go in, the gate closes, and the season’s work becomes planting rather than rebuilding a barrier that failed in the same three places last year. None of this argues that fencing is cheap or that every yard needs eight feet of it, and a lot on an open street with light browsing pressure may do fine with something shorter and simpler. It argues about which cost has an end date. Get a free estimate, ask specifically what happens at the bottom edge and what the gate hardware is, then hold that once-and-done figure against netting you have already bought twice. The vegetables are the point. The fence is only what keeps them yours.
