Selena's great ideas

My friend Selena has a garden that is always worth visiting.  Over the last year or so she has turned what was a weed and privet infested rocky slope into a terraced wonderland of food.  Her last addition to the garden design is one I'm stealing with pride.  When you fence off veggie beds to keep chickens in or out, you come across the problem of gates.  You want to fencing to be sturdy but perhaps not permanent and you want to gate to open easily, which often need some serious structural work.  My last visit to Selena's showed me an picturesque but cheap alternative - buy a simple arch from a hardware store, grow a climber up over it and use it as the structure for a simple wire gate.  I don't have a photo of Selena's, but here is the version we've just put in. The first one is a new vegie patch and the second and third are established ones.

When we let the chickens in here last time to clean up the buckwheat, before we planted the beans, we pulled the fence down and let them in.  This will be a much more elegant entry in future.  Especially as they will stroll in under a canopy of jasmine...