Living Fences: How-To, Advantages and Tips – Modern …

Fences on your farm or homestead define property boundaries and separate production zones (garden, pasture, orchard). They provide privacy and security from animal (and perhaps human) intruders. They confine livestock and protect them from predators. They guard crop areas from wild raiders (such as deer) as well as animal allies (such as sheep and goats).

Your first choice for such a multifunctional homestead necessity may be manufactured fencing: woven or electric wire, welded livestock panels, boards on pressure-treated posts, or even virgin or recycled plastic. As the energy and environmental crises deepen, however, such options are becoming less appealing and more expensive. The chemical preservatives, paints, and galvanizing agents used in fence manufacturing and maintenance may have toxic spillover effects in the environment. Furthermore, most manufactured fencing is a one for one solution. A woven wire fence meant to contain livestock, for example, provides that service and nothing more. The key to a more self-sufficient homestead that imitates natural systems is finding solutions that simultaneously solve more than one problem, provide more than one service and support more than one project. Enter living fences.

A living fence is a permanent hedge tight enough and tough enough to serve almost any of the functions of a manufactured fence, but it offers agricultural and biological services a manufactured fence cannot. For instance, it provides edge habitat that supports ecological diversity. As more species (insects, spiders, toads, snakes, birds and mammals) find food and refuge in this habitat, natural balances emerge, yielding, for example, a reduction of rodents and crop-damaging insect populations.

Depending on the plant or tree species you choose, living fences can provide food and medicine or fodder for your livestock. Your animals will also enjoy the shade of a dense hedge. The foliage of some hedge plants, such as elder and Chinese chestnut, contains more protein than the quintessential protein forage crop, alfalfa. Willow and honey locust also make good fodder. Ive been experimenting with Siberian pea shrub recently, as the peas can be harvested to feed poultry.

Leguminous species included in the fence, such as black locust and pea shrub,fix nitrogen in the soil throughout the root zone, and you can harvest some of that nitrogen for garden mulches and compost in the form of leafy prunings. A living fence increases soil humus as its leaf litter and root hairs (which the plants shed to balance loss of top growth to pruning or browsing) break down.

Living fences are windbreaks, which reduce soil drying, wind erosion, and stress on livestock or crop plants, thus increasing yields. Hedges sited along contours can reduce rainfall erosion on slopes.

Living fences can last far longer than manufactured ones for as long as the natural life span of the species used, which may be hundreds of years. Many species can be coppiced, meaning they will send up abundant new shoots after the main trunk has been cut. A living fence of a coppiced species readily renews itself following selective cutting for wood fuel and other uses.

Finally, a living fence, unlike a static manufactured fence, brings an ever-changing beauty to your landscape: flowers in spring, colorful fruit in summer, brilliant colors in fall and a complex, geometric structure in winter.

Though common in ornamental landscaping, living agricultural fences havent been used much in the United States, despite extensive use in countries that supplied Colonial America with most of its new settlers. George Washington tried to carry on the tradition at Mount Vernon because, like modern gardeners and orchardists, he was plagued by deer and other marauders. Washington, concerned by both the labor and the loss of forest involved in producing split-rail fencing, concluded that growing living fences was not only a good idea, but was a necessity.

According to Washingtons diary, the species he settled on as most suitable was Honey locust; the seed of which not to be put more than Six Inches a part; that when they get to any size they may be so close, stubborn, and formidable, as to prevent an escalade [incursion by predators] ... indeed I know of nothing that will so effectually, and at so small an expence, preserve what is within the Inclosure, as this plant.

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