Hi The frame is simply a rectangle of 3x2 timber with four legs cut from a 3x3 fence post. The light green material is a waterproof tarp material forming a loop. It acts as a gutter to direct the run off to a catchment container and also to shade the root zone. The black material in the pic is a geotex weed barrier type fabric which allows air and water through but prevents the roots and compost going anywhere. It is free draining and allows plenty of oxygen to get to the roots from above, below and the sides. I haven`t had any problems growing stuff in it over the winter so i guess heatloss isn`t a big factor. Cherry tomato plants love it..the bed is underneath these somewhere :)

Which Hyssop? True Hyssop as in Hyssopus officinalis? or Agastache spp.? I started the H. officinalis last year and they do have a very camphor like minty smell! I would also consider Lavender and Salvia officinalis (Culinary Sage) and it seems like I heard/read that Nasturtium was distasteful to them too. Rabbit will eat just about anything and everything if their hungry enough though! Vera

Chicken moats are real and legitimate and people who use them swear by them. : ) I even saw a photo once where someone put a tunnel underneath their driveway as part of their chicken moat so the chickens could travel safely beneath the driveway to reach the part of the garden on the other side of the driveway. Now I'll have to find and link an example of a chicken moat. I'd like to put a chicken moat around my garden, but our old, spoiled rotten chickens are used to free-ranging and wouldn't take kindly to being confined within a moat. If I ever do it, I'll have to use a new flock of young chickens who've never known the joy of free-ranging. Charles, Are you rural? You need guineas. I had them for a long time (more about them in the grasshopper thread) but after the year in which I had two cougar encounters on our property and we, and everyone in our very rural neighborhood lost all our poultry (and many lost cats and dogs)...and I'm talking in excess of 120 birds....I've never bought another flock of guineas. I was really attached to them and losing them one by one over the course of the summer was really painful. I haven't found any kind of shrub that grasshoppers won't eat. In our worst year here, they ate the young fruit trees, including the bark, the leaves, and the fruit (but left the pits hanging from the stems), and they even ate holes in our fiberglass window screens, the cotton rag rugs on the wraparound porch, etc. When they are hungry, grasshoppers will eat anything and everything. The dog we had when we first moved here would eat a grasshopper now and then, but none of our current dogs do....and he didn't eat enough to make a dent in their population either. Our chickens control them well outside the garden, but I don't like to let the chickens free range in the garden in spring through fall because they'll peck at fruit like tomatoes, which doesn't make me very happy. I will turn them loose in the garden in the fall after the garden is pretty much frozen and dead so they can dig and scratch and eat insects to their heart's content. When I have winter crops, they don't bother them much once they are no longer tiny new plants. Any task on our property that involves sticking an arm, hand or foot into a place where a snake might be lurking just doesn't get done at this time of the year. I do those tasks in winter. If I have to lift something, like a board or piece of sheet metal on the ground, I lift it with a stick because it is just about guaranteed a snake will be underneath it in the summer months. When you live around lots of venomous snakes, you learn to be careful. The closest I have had a venomous snake would be about 3" from my hand. It was in early March about a decade ago and it scared the fool out of me. If you don't start out being careful enough, you quickly learn to be more careful around places where snakes live. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Chicken Moats

That's quite a project! Can't wait to see photos. You may want to reconsider the trumpet vine. It can be very invasive. Before I knew that I bought one and kept it in a pot in one of my garden paths over the winter trying to decide where to plant it. I'm SO grateful I never did. By the time I realized what a thug it could be it had already put out roots far beyond the pot and they weren't east to dig up.