My 2024 DIY Fail Was a Fence Meant to Keep a Bevy of Animals From Ravaging My Garden

Before I moved to Los Angeles, I lived in New York, where I was an enthusiastic gardener, which meant that I had tomatoes and herbs and peppers in containers on my fourth floor outdoor space that my landlord advertised as a "balcony" but which was actually a fire escape in which the ladder had been removed, making escape impossible. My place in L.A. has four big, raised beds with a nice drip irrigation setup, plus it’s sunny all the time, and yet I have had major issues every year. At first it was dealing with the soil (which is high pH, generally contaminated, and either rocky or sandy or clay-y through most of the city). Then it was dealing with the sun, which is more direct and more unfiltered than it is back East, and which will roast plants into chips if left untended.

This year my problem was my neighbors: Walter, Kippi, Harold, and their friends. I love them deeply and would like to be friends with them, but they have made gardening very difficult. They’re destructive, a little rude, and hard to reason with, I think mostly because of the language barrier. Walter is a very large raccoon whose hobbies involve taking one big chomp out of a perfectly ripe fig from my tree and then dropping it onto the deck where it will eventually turn into some kind of sugar-based cement and be impossible to remove. Kippi is an opossum, Harold is all of the various tree squirrels, ground squirrels, mice, and other rodents nearby. I haven’t named the skunks yet but boy are they cute! I speak none of their dialects but I say hi when I see them.

This year I really put the work into my garden: multiple trips to the Griffith Park Compost Facility for compost and mulch, stabilizing the walls of the raised beds, installing a gigantic shade cloth to ward off the fierce desert sun. I started my seeds early in the spring, carefully tending them indoors. The garden looked perfect for about two weeks.

Then I noticed that my baby squash had been torn off the vine with a single bite taken out of them. My tomatoes were all eaten within a few days of their intended harvest. Cucumbers didn’t stand a chance. To a degree I expect this: I absolutely refuse to do anything that might harm my neighbors, whom, again, I love deeply, which includes any pesticides besides worthless organic stuff like neem oil which (in my experience) has only one effect: to make everything stinky. But I also found that my pepper plants, which mammals generally don’t like very much, were being…not eaten, but trampled.

I set out to construct something kind but effective: a massive fence made of dozens of yards of fine mesh (so nobody would get caught in it), looped around the entire garden. This was really hard and sort of dangerous to set up, because my garden borders about a five-foot sheer drop over which I was leaning and doing fine motor work. This project took longer than I really like to admit, and required garden staples and bungee cords and twine and elevated stakes to raise the shade cloth above the tops of the tomatoes. When I was done I realized I hadn’t left myself a way to actually get into the garden area. This was "solved" by partially cutting a vertical line through the mesh and securing those with butterfly clips, the tiny ones designed for hair. It was a horrible solution and I never changed it.

Two days later all my plants were eaten and trampled again. I decided to set up cameras, partially to find any gaps in my security system and partly because I thought it would be fun to see who came by at night. What I saw most nights was Kippi the opossum strolling through the garden, having somehow gotten in there with much more ease than I could, stomping on my herbs and breaking my pepper plants in half. Opossums are generally friends, not just for me but for all gardeners, since they mostly eat pests and rotting produce. I tried a few times to find how she was getting in there but couldn’t figure it out. Kippi, who is a primitive weirdo with a brain roughly one fifth the size of Walter’s (who is himself a raccoon), had outsmarted me. I gave up. I had already done more work on this stupid garden than any renter should. The garden now is my gift to my animal friends. Enjoy my lemon cucumbers. Enjoy these cool Japanese tomatoes I found at a garden shop one time. Enjoy breaking my pepper plants in half. I will take whatever is left, and I hope Walter and Kippi and Harold mention to their pals that I am a generous host to all who share my space.

Top photo by Robert Bannister/Getty Images

Related Reading:

When the Neighbors Are Bobcats, Bats, and Bears

A Comprehensive Guide on How to Handle the Pesky Vermin Invading Your Home