Relative Something

Why, yes, in case you were wondering, we do have a tree, two of them, in fact, inside the fence of one of our paddocks. (I just wanted to see how many commas I could fit in a sentence.)

We have been informed by many different sources, that we need to protect our trees from the horses gnawing on the bark. Some folks, we were told, put a fence around trees in this kind of situation. We didn’t want to go to that extreme, so we planned to wrap the trees in something that would block access.

My first attempt involved some left-over plastic fence material from one of Cyndie’s previous garden projects. The horses quickly showed me they are more than happy to chew on plastic, which wasn’t a surprise, so I moved on to the next left-over material I could find lying around. There was some chicken wire that might do the trick, if I could make the limited amount stretch far enough.

It didn’t. I ran short of being able to get high enough up the willow tree, and somebody in the herd decided it was time to show what they could do if given the opportunity. When I noticed some bark had gotten chewed, I figured I needed to take it to a new level, and go the route of a fence. I don’t know why I was limiting my focus to only using materials we had on hand, but it occurred to me that we kept some old cattle fence that would work to keep them from reaching the trunk.

That effort was doomed to having been under-thought and poorly executed. Cyndie reminded me that the size of the squares were large enough to get a hoof through, so we needed to wrap it in a mesh like we did on the big field border fence. Then I noticed that they were just pushing and mouthing that structure to a degree that I would need to keep adding upgrades that would soon have it looking like a Rube Goldberg contraption.

While exploring Fleet Farm the other day, I stumbled upon some material called hardware cloth that wasn’t too expensive. It resonated with me and I decided to give it a try. We dismantled the cattle fencing completely and went back to just wrapping the trunk of the tree, leaving the earlier vinyl and metal chicken wire attempts as a base layer. Now it has a look of medieval chainmail armor from a distance.

I feel like it’s a challenge to the horses, inviting them to try their worst, by allowing them to get right up to it. They can rub their bodies to scratch themselves, then find a weak spot where they could get a grip with their teeth to pull and tear at it until something gives and it looks a mess.

I was hoping Cyndie would just ask them to refrain from chewing on the bark, but apparently it doesn’t quite work that way.