Landscape With Slash

This vegetable garden features 1: deer and rabbit fence wire supported by a cedar slash frame, 2: raised bed areas created with stone and small twisty cedar logs that would never get loaded on a truck at any logging operation and 3: cedar gate with self closing hinges made from salvaged industrial conveyor belt material.

This old conveyor belt material is 5/8" thick and made like a nylon belted tire. It is incredibly tough and very handy to have around for right job. Here, the perfect amount of self closing tension can be achieved by scoring the rubber side of at the radius of the open hinge.

The frame supporting the wire has poles secured to existing cedar stumps and the twisty logs at the front of the garden bed. The poles and boards are made from very slow growing (tight grain) cedar trees about 6” in diameter. Small, tight grained cedar logs come from trees that had a hard life. They are frequently not perfectly straight. When milled into dimensional stock, internal stresses are relieved, resulting in extremely bowed or crowned boards. Clearly material that would not likely ever get loaded on the truck at that commercial log harvesting operation. Boards for the frame were milled specifically for this application. They are rough cut to 1 1/8” thick and usually not dimensioned on one edge (natural shape of the tree with wane). Badly crowned boards are used to an advantage in this project. Pairs of boards around the top of the frame are mounted with the top board bowed up and the bottom board bowed down. The boards were then pulled together straightening and stressing them before the spreaders were attached. The resulting structure works like a pre-stressed beam with more strength and rigidity than it would other wise have. You can’t buy wood like this at Home Depot, or at any other retail lumber outlet conveniently available to the public. It seems significant that the lumber you can buy at Home Depot would not work as well for building this structure as lumber made from logs left behind as slash by the operation that eventually supplies Home Depot with their ordinary dimension lumber.