You've created the most beautiful vegetable garden in your backyard, and then boom, the deer and the gophers show up. Your garden devolves into complete chaos, plants disappearing overnight.

But what if I told you the problem isn't the pests? It's the fact that you built an enticing all-you-can-eat-buffet in the middle of a food desert.

Don't worry. You don't have to abandon all your gardening hopes. All you have to do is build a fence around your garden. Not a normal fence with wooden posts. This is a fence made with plants—native plants and pollinator-friendly plants, to be exact—that will protect your garden from pests and create a habitat for local wildlife.

Why Do Animals Come to Your Garden?

Before your neighborhood was developed, your lot was part of a complete ecosystem. Now, it's just grass—probably non-native grass, at that—and it's not providing food for anything, really.

So when you set up a vegetable garden, every animal around will show up for dinner. Rabbits, squirrels, deer, gophers, groundhogs, birds. They've been searching for food, and now they think you created this beautiful garden just for them.

The first time I set up a garden, I was shocked at just how many creatures, great and small, wanted to eat from it. After spending several years frustrated and wishing every squirrel in my neighborhood would just disappear, I finally figured out a way to garden and work with wildlife, instead of fighting against it.

And the solution is a living fence.

What Is a Living Fence?

A living fence is simply a barrier that consists of closely planted trees, shrubs, and flowers. In rural areas, living fences are often planted to stop crosswinds; in these cases, they're called hedgerows or windbreaks. But when it comes to pest protection, your fence should surround your entire garden area, and it should ideally consist of plants native to your region.

Why?

Because native plants are the preferred food sources of wildlife living in your area. Deer, for example, love natives like goldenrod, partridge pea, salmonberry, ninebark, and blackberry. When these plants are around, they don’t find your lettuce plants quite so appealing.

The idea is to create a buffet for wildlife outside of your vegetable garden by creating a fence made of native plants they love to eat. That way, animal pests are satisfied without needing to nibble your tomatoes.

My kitchen garden here in Nashville is surrounded by a 3-foot-wide native plant and pollinator garden space. My backyard is unfenced and backs up to a wooded area, so wildlife regularly visit our yards. But I've found that my spinach and carrot plants are not top of the menu anymore because there are other foods that critters like even more in my native plant space.

Of course, you could plant a living fence that's meant to deter wildlife instead of offering them things to nibble from the outside. In that case, you'd want to focus on thorny or dense shrubs like barberry and holly. You could also create a border out of boxwoods or other thick hedges, but I like to stick with native plants.

The Benefits of a Living Fence

I've already touched on the benefits of using native plants in your living fence, but I also want to mention they're the very epitome of low maintenance. Once they're established, they really don't need much care from you at all, not even supplemental watering (assuming you've selected the right plants for your climate).

Here are the other benefits of a living fence made up of native plants:

Hide Your Vegetable Garden

As the plants in your living fence grow taller and fill out, they block the sightline to your vegetable garden. Animals that use sight to forage for food will only see the native plant space, not all your yummy vegetables. Bonus: You might enjoy a little privacy from neighbors, as well.

Feed Wildlife

Think about the diet of the typical animals we're trying to keep out of our gardens (deer, rabbits, squirrels, gophers, etc.). They don't necessarily eat things like tomatoes and radishes and watermelon out in the wild. Instead, they're eating plants that grow naturally in their native habitats.

So if you plant native plants in your living fence, you're providing a more preferred food source right next to your vegetable garden. Now the wildlife have something great to eat—something they actually like even better than your kale leaves.

Native plants are ones that local wildlife evolved eating. Think goldenrod, milkweed, elderberry, rudbeckia, echinacea, and dewberry. These plants offer nuts, seeds, berries, and nectar that wildlife are looking for. When a squirrel takes a bite out of your cherry tomato, it's really hoping for a salmonberry. That bird pecking away at your peas settled when it couldn't find any echinacea seeds or holly berries.

Animals prefer native plants. When they can't find them (again, because of habitat loss), they visit your vegetable garden instead.

→ Explore my list of the top native plants to grow around your kitchen garden.

Attract Pollinators

Pollinators and other beneficial insects are the good guys when it comes to your garden. They're the bugs you most want zipping around your vegetable plants. In fact, it's best to have them circling your garden at all times, and a living fence filled with pollinator-friendly plants will not only invite them in but encourage them to stick around.

Provide Year-Round Interest

A living fence can provide not just seasonal color but also beauty 12 months out of the year if you add plants with different bloom times and take into consideration what a plant looks like out of season, as well. Even if a plant isn't an evergreen, it could still have really nice structure during the coldest months. Native grasses, for example, send up beautiful feathery plumes in the fall.

Plus, if you don't have an existing barrier to line your garden up with—such as a fence, a porch, your house, etc.—a living fence is a great way to define the edges of your vegetable garden without putting up a traditional fence.

Create Habitat

The different plants within a living fence can create a habitat by providing shade, places where wildlife can raise their young, and maybe even little pockets of water.

This does mean that more wildlife will visit your space overall. But here's the thing: prey animals like deer, rabbits, and squirrels will be worried that predators are also lurking nearby. The prey animals might hide in your living fence but think twice before boldly treating your garden as a free-for-all because they have no idea if a coyote or fox could be nesting or hiding nearby.

Deer especially prefer to be in wide-open spaces so they can see everything around them. If they were to venture into my garden, surrounded as it is by the living fence, they might wonder if something's hiding in the grasses and tall plants next to them. They just can't be sure there's not a predator around the corner.

That's probably why I haven't seen a single deer inside my garden, but my next-door neighbor's garden, which is not surrounded by native plants, regularly gets visited. (You can see the contrast between our gardens in the picture below.)

Similarly, squirrels don't like being low to the ground so close to places where predators could attack them. These animal pests were a much bigger issue in my Nashville garden before I added my native plant space.

How to Create a Living Fence

Setting up a living fence is fairly simple and straightforward since you'll be planting directly in the ground. Just follow these steps:

1. Use stakes and twine to mark a 3- to 4-foot-wide space around the entire perimeter of your kitchen garden.
2. If that area includes lawn, use a tool like a sod cutter to remove existing grass inside the designated area, or build your garden on top using the sheet mulching method.
3. Level the space by transferring topsoil from high places to bring up low spots.
4. Line the space with some type of garden border (like metal edging) to maintain tidy edges, keep out grass, and contain materials like gravel or mulch.
5. Now for the hardest part: picking out plants that are native to your region. I have a list of my favorite native plants to get you started. We also have a complete course on setting up a native plant space, including selecting the best plants for your location and preferences.
6. Divide the plants you've selected into groups: large, medium, and small. This will help you decide where to put each plant. I typically use a 1:3:6 ratio—that's one large plant for every three medium-size plants and six small plants. Typically, taller plants should go in the back of the space so they don't block sunlight from the others. Other than that, you have a lot of freedom for how you lay these plants out. You could, for example, plant little groupings of the same plant or do long rows instead.
7. Buy the plants and place them around the space while still in their nursery pots. This helps you see what the garden will actually look like.
8. Dig holes and transplant plants first; then add any seeds you'll be growing.
9. Water daily or every other day for the first two weeks to encourage the seeds to sprout and the plants to get established.
10. After that, let these plants do their thing. They really don't need irrigation or any special fertilization. They're going to grow well because they're native to your area.

→ Read our article on how to start a native plant garden. For way more details and support, check out our Native Plant Garden Course.

Surrounding your edibles with a living fence is not a guarantee, but it certainly adds an extra layer of deterrence. At the very least, it might slow a very hungry deer or a persistent gopher down.

I love designing living fences around my clients' kitchen gardens because they're beautiful and make the garden space feel more complete. Personally, I like knowing that I'm feeding wildlife and taking care of them while also growing great, organic food that will feed my family. That's why I think of my living fence as protection and a peace offering all in one.

If you want way more insight into my stress-free way of dealing with pests in my organic garden, check out our Organic Pest Control Method. It covers my complete system for protecting my garden naturally, no toxic pesticides, no stress.

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