Last summer I began container gardening in an unprotected area on the back of my house. I quickly found that the area is the nocturnal javelina (pronounced hav-e-LIN-a) highway. These native relatives of the pig are not terribly picky eaters and can be quite destructive and I quickly got into an arms race with them. As the summer went on and more attempts were made on my garden, I upgraded my defenses. I started out with a ring of chicken wire. Then they bent and crushed that, so I put rebar stakes in, each pounded a full foot into the ground. Then I added zip ties to keep the chicken wire in place on the stakes. I thought I had finally won.This morning they proved me wrong. For the winter I turned one of my larger containers into a compost bin. While it will give me lots of valuable compost, it also proved a tempting target, surviving a number of attacks from both the javelinas and my dog. However, it seems I have underestimated the tenacity of an animal whose head is designed to push through some of the toughest bramble in the world. This morning, there was a giant hole in my chicken wire where, presumably, the javelinas just pushed right through.
Alas. Now I have to engineer a tougher barrier. Sounds like fun.
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