The value of nets

One of the lessons I’ve learnt over the past year has been the value of covering veg crops with fleece or netting.  In recent years I’ve tried to cover brassica crops such as cabbages with nets – not always very successfully! – against cabbage white butterflies, which lay their eggs on them (producing caterpillars that eat their way through the plant), and to lay fleece on newly-planted garlic cloves to stop birds from pulling them up.  But more is needed, particularly against the pigeons and partridges.

I removed the fleece from the garlic bed in early winter, so that the garlic leaves could grow up straight.  It didn’t stop the birds; while the bulbs have remained in situ, the leaf tips have been eaten off.  I think the plants will survive, but it’s annoying.  Equally annoying is the adjacent bed of radicchio, which I didn’t cover (thinking, naively, that it would be too bitter for the wildlife to attack), but which has been nibbled down and in some cases scratched up.  Too late now to do anything about it; although the plants might recover and grow new leaves in the spring/summer, as one rogue plant left from autumn 2024 has done, I will want that part of the bed for other plants.  Then there’s the sad demise of last year's leeks, attacked by allium leaf miner; I shall have to net my leeks this year to prevent another attack. 

On a more positive note, this winter’s brassicas have been netted and are doing well (so far); no pigeons eating the broccoli tops, no butterfly damage on the spring cabbages.  Lesson learnt.

Broad bean seedlings, still in the cold frame

The first sowing of broad beans, sown in late autumn and kept in the cold frame until yesterday, has gone into the ground (the bed vacated by the leeks - any leaf miners remaining in the soil shouldn’t attack the beans), and a tent of fleece placed over the top.  In the cold weather, hungry pigeons and partridges, and maybe pheasants, will peck at anything green, and being large birds they can pull plants out of the ground quite easily (like the radicchio!); in winter other birds can scratch through freshly laid mulch in search of grubs, regardless of any small plants in the way.  Once the weather warms up, they might not be so destructive, and once the shooting season stops in a few weeks’ time the game birds won’t necessarily be hanging around the garden so much.  There were 20 partridges gathering on the lawn a few days ago, and a dozen or so hiding in the shrubs today.  In a few weeks' time I might be able to protect plants with a nest of pointy sticks instead of nets or fleece!