Something There Is That Doesn't Love a Wall

Don't you just love Robert Frost?  I no longer have a captive audience for my poetry lessons, so please indulge me.  A few lines from "Mending Wall":

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

Yep.  It seems Nature dislikes a wall.  She seems to know no boundaries. 

Consider the picture above.  I take such great pains to put in a perfectly positioned trellis for the green bean vines, and what do they do?  They jump over and grow up the tomato stakes!  Can't they see that I have this garden perfectly mapped out?  Don't they see the white boards delinieating their space?  They have no respect for my boundaries!

Or, take this zucchini plant.  I have allotted it 9 square feet, as per my gardening book directives.  So, why must it encroach upon my lettuce.  9 square feet -- that's all you get, Mr. Zucchini.

But the beauty of the garden knows no boundaries.  Who am I to reign it in? 

And, what of fences designed to give our animals more space but keep them out of neighboring yards?

In "Mending Wall," the speaker meets his neighbor for their annual fence-line walk wherein they mend a year's worth of damage to the fence separating their properties:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

"Why do they make good neighbors?  Isn't it

Where there are cows?  But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to  know

What I was walling in or walling out,

In our case, we're walling in goats and walling out the crazy dog down the street and any other creature that could harm our precious herd.

Here are the goats on their first day in the field.  Yes, that's the chicken tractor out there, too.  We're going to have to rethink that, though.  Honey sent the ladies into a flurry of panic when she made it half-way into the chicken coop earlier this afternoon.  I'd opened the coop door to throw the chickens some goodies, and Honey apparently thought it would be a good time to introduce herself to her new neighbors.

The chickens, it seems, like their boundaries just fine!  ;)