Stop the foxes and pigeons; step 1 of infinity and beyond

We have had a recurring issue of foxes intruding into our garden and raiding the veggie patch.

This blog post will be devoted to Step 1 with a planned Step 2 blog post to come

(post editing: many more stages maybe required, perhaps until I shuffle off this mortal coil! )

The image above links to my video content on this story.

Now foxes are wily creatures and I am definitely sceptical that they could ever be entirely stopped, but I am hoping to slow them down a touch by laying a layer of anti-climbing spikes along the top fence.

Step 1. Lay the anti-climbing spikes along the wooden fence top.

(Important added bonus, it should stop the pigeons sitting here and crapping on our boundary wall.)

These are fairly nasty looking strips, I certainly wouldn't use them as a pilates mat !

Here I was assisted in this task by my old Aussie mate Mark. You can see that I gave him the fun task of clearing off the old shrub and hedge growth that was living atop the brick wall.

Here he is again at final stages of the clean up.

With the clearing done, we both got to work and layed the strips along the top of the wooden fence.

With that excellent work taken we knew that Step 2 would be required to stop the foxes running along the back of the wooden structure.

But at least we were comforted in the knowledge that this bit of work would at least stop the pigeons using the top of the fence as a latrine !

Lesson - no plan ever survives contact with the enemy !

We didn't count on the S&M variety of pigeon that enjoy the acupuncture like massage of the anti-climbing spikes.

Step 2. Lay out more anti-climbing spikes along the top of brick wall en masse , so that it creates a large enough block of spikes that they cannot jump over it. This will be the subject of second blog post.