Keeping The Critters Out

A stroll around my garden at the moment reveals a number of beds and individual plants with netting draped over them. It looks as if the plants are in prison, but it's all for their own good. The covers are keeping the critters from eating them or digging them up.

Cabbage white butterflies are a perennial problem. I usually wait until they have disappeared from the garden and try to get a crop of brassicas planted and harvested before they re-appear in spring. Sometimes this results in beds still being occupied by brassica crops when I'm ready to plant spring/summer crops, thus resulting in those crops being planted later than I would wish. I do place upside down bottles over individual seedlings, but then the seedlings can outgrow the bottles when there are still cabbage whites around. This year I decided to cover the beds with netting to keep the pests off my seedlings.

One lonely broccoli plant all by itself in a pot was outgrowing its protective bottle so I bought some cheap, wire, waste paper baskets from a discount store. Turned upside down, these make good plant protectors. By the time the broccoli has outgrown its basket, there should be no cabbage whites around for a while. At nearly $3 per basket, this might seem like an expensive way to get a bit of broccoli or a cabbage. Wouldn't it be cheaper just to buy it? In the short-term it would be, but I'm sure the baskets will last many years. Their use will also allow me to grow better-tasting and more nutritious food without chemicals, and to plant the varieties of my own choosing. So, I maintain that it's worth the small expense and taking a bit of trouble over.

In another tank bed I had transplanted some strawberry runners so that next season the crop will be easier to harvest and also easier to keep the blackbirds off. Until last year these birds were not really a problem, they would visit, scratch around for a while, and then move on. Now they seem to be permanent residents, scratching the mulch everywhere. They soon found the new strawberry bed with its lovely loose mulch. Even though there is no fruit, they have been having a good fossick, scratching out some plants and covering others in mulch. That bed too is now covered.

The vegie garden might look like some kind of plant prison, but it's me who will be eating that great food and not the free-loading critters.