Creating a Wattle Fence and Dead Hedge

I kill everything I touch.

Opening to an angsty YA dystopian novel from the early '00s or the sad reality of my gardening life?

It's both!

For many years, I have nurtured seeds to plantlings, only to have the growth cut short due to my impatience and frost or my patience and a late frost or squash beetles.

This year, I've decided to manage what's actually living while building soil, so I've started using wisteria vines to create wattle fences to surround dead hedges.

My working definitions:

Wattle Fence: A fence woven from natural materials.

Dead Hedge: A hedge created from dead trees and other organic materials.

Building the Wattle Fence using Wisteria

1. Pound in poles: a truly organic fence would use trees that I downed, but I had these T-posts and no desire to sharpen Bradford Pear trunks at the moment, so my son put in these posts for me.

Because I'm using the fence to build a space for dead materials, I have four posts in for a rectangle. If this were a boundary fence, I would use a straight line of poles.

2. Start Weaving

We have an excess of wisteria in our woods, so I cut lengths of it and wove it around the poles.

I like to do more than one strand at a time for strength and thickness.

Note: I possibly should have harvested this in January, let the vines die, and then rehydrated them for the weaving. I may have replanted a lot of new wisteria, but, again, I refer you to my impatience.

3. Partially Weave, and then Start to Fill

I wove about a 1/4 of the height before I started to put in dead logs at the bottom.

The logs separate any potentially living material from the ground and make the hedge easier to fill.

After that, I wove another section and stuffed it with small trees, blackberry brambles, and a lot of other materials that I have cleaned out of various areas over the past month.

The wattling isn't necessary, but I like it to keep the mess in and to make the hedge a little more intentional looking.

This is the final product along with a persimmon tree trellis I made last week!

How do you create organic structures in your garden? Let me know in the comments!