If the garden is indeed small, I would get deer netting and some 6’ t-posts (which will only be ~5’ tall once installed) and ring it.
If it’s bigger, deer tend to jump inside of shorter fencing or netting, if they think they can fit. In that case you need much taller and/or different kind of deer fence/netting.
Be forewarned, some woodland creatures can climb fencing (but netting is harder for them because it flops about) and some will dig. My small temporary garden here (last year) I buried hardware cloth (I think it is 1" but maybe smaller) as deep as I could, which is only like 1’ because of New England soils (rocky) and I was sort of doing it on the fly. The hardware cloth also sticks up ~ a foot above soil. This was to prevent digging animals. Then I had deer netting about 5’ tall. I didn’t have any mammal pests in the garden at all, and I have literally every New England woodland creature here, including my infamous groundhogs.
You might still get squirrels with this setup, they are very acrobatic. Maybe chipmunks too? In the dry west squirrels are a scourge because they eat your tomatoes (possibly for the water content - they take like one bite out of each one, the bastards), but though I have both grey and red squirrels here, and chippies, I never saw them in the garden.
Also if you think the kind of like slat fencing is adequate, it is not. My sister used that and rabbits got in and ate all her peas and bean sprouts. I warned her, but.
These guys were barely deterred by chicken fencing – they just climbed right over it.I did reduce their digging eventually by putting bamboo skewers pokey end up at roughly 6" spacing
Oh, yeah, I guess I mean they’re really concentrated in urban areas (because of garbage) and so are more likely to also be a problem in an urban garden? IDK. They are the one common mammal I’ve yet to see at the house. (There, I’ve cursed myself now.) I mean, I have fox and coyote and bobcat and porcupine that regularly saunter through! But nary one of these guys (yet).
Thanks for clarifying, I headed straight outside after I posted. I’ve been chainsawing and fixing the neighbours fence that our trees took out at the end of October.
You can totally use fluorescent shop light fixtures (which you can often get on Buy Nothing) with full spectrum bulbs, for cheap. You need to hang them very close to the seedlings in order for it to work (like at most a few inches), so your setup needs to accommodate being able to raise/lower either the lights or the trays. I had big wire shelves and used chains to hang the lights, which could be adjusted at will (although a pain to do). I’ll be getting LED grow lights this year, I think, because I gave away all my lights 2 years ago when I moved away from UT, and limped through last year with nothing (because my windows are so old that they have no UV coating, lol) but I haven’t bought any yet, so don’t have a rec (yet)…
We set up our subpod (in ground worm farm) and it’s garden bed on the weekend. Fresh garden soil is turning up this week, and then we can plant some seeds in it!
