Reflecting trends in Australia more broadly, the population behind bars in my garden is steadily increasing. The metaphor starts to break down there because my indigenous plants aren’t systematically and grotesquely over-represented in prison.  And it’s not collective punishment, more like protective custody.

Here are some of the make-shift prisons keeping chooks and brush-turkeys at bay. Eventually I suspect I might just cage the whole veggie garden, as much to deflect the midsummer sun as to prevent raids by flying dinosaurs.  Some of our neighbours are already there, as you can see from this fabulous repurposing of a Hills Hoist.

In the mean time, I’m finding new and creative if not visually attractive ways of leveraging my pathological hoarding… from the tried and true bit of broken trellis…

Yellow zucchini seedlings

“Sugar baby” watermelon seedling

… to recycled heavy rubbish finds.

So far mysterious steel objects from the side of the road 1: brush turkeys 0 (though not for want of trying).

Red okra seedling – safe for the moment

Seedling burgundy okra

Burgundy okra

There’s an array of objects yearning for landfill propping up veggie nets:

Old umbrella frame protecting salad greens

Once it was a rattan salad bowl. Now it is giving lebanese zucchini head room under a veggie net

Kicking a goal for asparagus, sorrel and watercress with the spine of an old kids’ soccer goal

Methuselah broccoli protected by an old clothes hanger (shallots in the background). This broccoli is six months old (not a joke). Everytime it gets to about 10 cm something eats it. Health-conscious critters around here – I’m not going to bother planting goji berries!

and then there’s the open prison: things surviving against the odds outside the fence that encloses the veggie garden.

Chilli bush protected by pea sticks

Rock samphire – sticks and stones may break your bones but they also discourage visits from possums and chickens

Of course that’s making the assumption that the fence is high security. Somehow, I don’t think so:

“Frenchette”from my lavender hedge, in front of the garden gate

Inside the veggie garden fence there’s a broad bean fence. And inside the broad bean fence is… Andy Ninja. She can break in as well as out.

I thought Shyla was sleep but the minute I moved the veggie net to show off the toning colours of the yellow zucchini leaves and the broken kids camping chair, she was in like a rat up a drainpipe.

Okay, my road-side finds are not quite quirky enough to function as garden ornamentation (I need to yarn bomb my umbrella!).  And I don’t think these pics will appear on Buzzfeed under “2014’s Best Organic Garden P*rn”.

Perhaps I should proudly locate my backyard in the fine tradition of rural homesteads featuring interactive museums of rusting Massey Fergussons and defunct Valiants, and in-situ galleries of op art reinterpreted in the language of car tyres, tarpaulins and giant piles of silage.

I’d like to flatter myself that the selling point of my carceral structures is functionality, rather than kerb appeal.  However, drawing on painful experience, I know there’s a strong possibility that around about the time my plantlets look like producing something edible, there’ll be a conspiracy between a brush turkey and a windy day and I’ll see roots wafting in the breeze.