We used a vinyl scalloped picket fence, and just as farmer_at_heart said, I had to run chicken wire along the base of the picket fence to keep out the bunnies. I cut a 2' high roll of 2" mesh chicken wire lengthwise to make long strips 1 foot high. This seems to be high enough to keep out the rabbits. Most of the time I don't even notice it's there. The vinyl fence is OK, but in retrospect I wish we had done something more natural looking. I guess it looks fine from a distance, but whenever I get up close to it, it looks like plastic to me. On the flip side, it never needs to be painted and is arguably the easiest of all fences to install. This is mainly because the brackets can be mounted anywhere on the post. So if you can get the post down 3 feet in the ground, then great - mount the brackets and drop the panel in place. If you can only get the post down 2 feet, then no big deal, just mount the brackets at that height and it will be fine. We have a lot of ledge around us, and 2 of my posts are only a few inches deep. This wasn't a problem really because I just dug out around the ledge as best I could, then poured a bag of concrete in the hole, then set the post and poured a little more concrete inside the hollow post. Once it dried, it was very stable, as the posts are now permanently bonded to the ledge. I just screwed in the brackets at the appropriate height and lopped off the top of the post. Point being, vinyl is very easy to work with. -Diggity

Our experience with UBI was definitely positive. We wanted a home built to a higher quality and with more amenities than average. Also, as experienced DIYers, we were planning on doing the plumbing, electrical, DV fireplace, central vac, enclosed deck, insulation prep work, floor tile prep, and many other aspects of construction ourselves. There was heartburn over the concept of paying UBI a percentage on work that we would be performing (why pay for oversight that we didnÂt need?). UBI offered a straight fee based on square footage that allowed us to achieve the 5% UBI cost on the home (combination of lower fee and more spent on upgrades). Regardless of how your home gets built, acting as your own GC or using a consultant, I strongly recommend issuing detailed RFQÂs for each aspect of the home when you bid the subs. Do your research and get educated on each aspect of the home and the best building practices to use. www.buildingscience.com is a huge resource for this. We didnÂt stay strictly with UBI-recommended subs, but also found high-quality subs ourselves. Many quote packages sent out had a full page or two of itemized details of what we wanted. Sometimes drawings from published articles were included to explain the particulars and procedures so there was no misunderstanding. I know this level of detail kept us away from many issues and misunderstanding during the build process. Also required are daily visits to the jobsite. Many were to talk through on-site what a sub was bidding; sometimes these exchanges resulted in improvements in materials or practices that we didnÂt know about. We always visited daily during construction to oversee potential quality issues. Realize, too, that there always will be the inevitable changes that need to be worked out as issues arise. Hope this helps.

Yes, we are on a well which was the only "improvement" on the 10 acres when we bought it over 10 years ago. We bought it then as a buffer for another 10 acre property we already owned and more recently decided to build the straw bale house on it,, a dream for a long time. There are restrictions in this area for habitat protection but if you are looking at + 5 acre parcels I would think you could accommodate those protections and still find buildable areas for the size home you want. You will need to keep in mind the required clearances around your home for fire protection, a serious concern for this area. We love that we are rural but an hour to downtown San Diego, for beaches, and all that the city has to offer. I hope to post our home progress this weekend and will be happy to try to answer any questions I can for you. Best of luck!

We have tons of deer here and they eat everything they can reach, so a good garden fence is imperative. Like Dorothy, we had a short garden fence for ages and it worked well, until suddenly it just didn't work any more. Once the deer started jumping it, we had to raise it from 4' to 8'. Being a person who loves to grow vertically in order to get more harvest out of the space we have, I now grow beans and all kinds of other climbers on the garden fence, and the deer still come by and eat anything they can reach on the fence at times, but at least everything within the fence is protected. Well, it is protected as long as you don't forget and leave the garden gates open at night. Since our front garden started out with a 4' tall fence, it had just t-posts and woven wire fencing. We put in taller posts when we raised it to 8' but made the upper fencing chicken wiring as a budgetary thing at the time. It has worked out okay but I don't like the way it looks and for several years now I've wanted to redo the front garden fence to make it sturdier like the back garden fence. It perpetually stays on the To Do list but not high enough on the list that it ever gets done. The back garden fence is maybe 5 or 6 years old, and we made it 8' tall from the start as deer trails run right through that area in several directions. For it, we used 8' landscape timbers as posts and two runs of 4' high woven wire fencing. The top foot or two of the fence extends upon above the posts and is bent slightly outward to help deter climbers like raccoons. There is 1" chicken wire attached to the inside of the lower 2' of fencing to keep out rabbits and such. Deer have never breached this fence, but on some drought-plagued years, the deer have stood outside the fence and watched me work inside, which is sort of creepy. (ALWAYS close the gate behind you when you go into the garden, so no unwanted animals can come in there while you're in there, and have 2 gates at opposite ends in case a skunk, bobcat or cougar shows up. These are lessons I learned the hard way.) Sinking fencing into the ground can help keep out burrowing critters, depending on the topography of your land and all. It doesn't work in our back garden which is sort of like a mesa that sits 4 to 6' higher than adjacent non-gardening land because there was no way I was going to sink fencing down 4' to 6', so that back garden has vole issues. They are worse in drought years and not so bad in good years when the voles can find plenty to eat in our acres of woodland. For root crops in the front garden, I have three raised beds lined with 1/4' hardware cloth to keep out the burrowing critters, something made necessary by the great vole immigration of 2011 when everything left the woods in tremendous drought, moved into the garden and began eating potatoes and other root crops. I'd like to eventually build hardware cloth-lined beds in the whole back garden, but I'm not sure Tim and I will live long enough to get that done. It is a tremendous amount of work and quite costly so we just keep it in mind as one of those things we want to do one of these days if we ever can get around to it. Every time I try to start any new major garden project, it seems like wildfires start breaking out and devouring our time, so my major "wants" often stay on a To Do list for ages and ages before we can get them done. We have had a marked decrease in most wildlife problems since the Red River record flooding of 2015 which occurred I think 5 times in our area, and which then occurred again on a smaller (and not quite record-breaking) scale multiple times in 2016. However, you cannot let your guard down because even if you see less wildlife for a few years, their population is cyclical and always rebounds. There are many deer fence designs available online to copy. And, we did try deer netting/deer fencing and found that it was not very effective. Deer here can run into it at a full tilt and knock it over enough to be able to scale it. Then you come out in the morning to fencing tilting at various weird angels, netting half pulled down off of it, and a trampled garden because the deer had to run around in circles and work up speed to be able to get back out of the fenced garden once they had breeched the netting and gotten into it. Our experiment with deer netting fencing around a small potager's garden was a dismal failure that only lasted a few years. Sturdy, woven wire fencing and strong posts work best for us in our location and with our soil. Electric fencing can work if you maintain a bare fence line so nothing can interfere in its operation, but I've also seen deer master going between two strands of electrical fencing the same way they glide effortlessly between strands of barbed wire fencing. The worse the drought and the hungrier the deer are, the harder they will try to overcome your fencing, and the harder they try, the more successful they are. We go to so many grass fires/barn fires/house fires started by electrical fencing igniting dry grass land areas and then having those fires run wild and hit the nearest structures that I steer completely clear of electrical fencing. I am sure they are great in some areas, but living here in the midst of thousands of acres of grassland on all sides of us and having grass fires be such a common problem here, they're not a good option for us. Be sure to spend the money for sturdy wooden posts that won't rot because the posts need to last for decades without their sturdiest becoming compromised by rot. Our early garden fence worked because we had two separate 4' high fences about 3' apart, creating a "garden moat" that the deer couldn't breech for many years. Deer generally can jump high or wide but not high and wide at the same time. I grew flowers in that moat for the pollinators and sometimes the deer reached over the outer fence and ate the flowers, but my veggies remained safe inside the inner fence. Finally, though, and it may have been during the 2008-09 drought (or maybe 2005-06, as the years all run together in my memory now), a deer figured out how to jump sideways over the first fence, landing in the "moat" and then could jump sideways over the inner fence, landing in the garden. Once one deer did it, others learned from him. One day I walked out and had a whole herd of deer in my garden and most of the plants eaten down to the ground, or pulled out of the ground and tossed aside after a few bites. My garden got eaten down to the ground repeatedly that year, and we took out the inner fence and then raised the outer fence to 8' on most sides. Repellents never have worked for us, and we have to keep our dogs inside at night because of all the wild animals that roam around here in the dark, so the dogs are not effective at repelling deer here. We have lots and lots of coyotes, and our dogs tangled with coyotes once (in broad daylight in the middle of the day) and that was enough for me. Now the dogs are confined to a fenced-in dog yard (also with 8' high fencing to keep them safe from coyotes and other varmints), and all the dogs sleep indoors at night. The deer that live here are very friendly (too friendly) and aren't afraid of our dogs at all as they know the dogs are confined. Sometimes if I haven't been putting enough goodies on the compost pile for the deer to steal, they come into the yard and look in the window at me. I love looking at the deer and we went to extraordinary lengths to provide them with food and water during the summer of 2011, but I don't want them in the garden eating everything. Dawn