Grow Your Own Magazine

We're interested in hearing about your great ideas for protecting young seedlings in outdoor beds. Do you have any make-do-and-mend cloche inventions up your sleeve? Or simply recycle household objects as guards on the plot? If so, we'd love to hear from you. The more unconventional, the better!

A selection of your responses will be edited and published in the April issue's Allotment Notice Board.

I generally use plastic bottles with the bottoms cut off, but I've also got an old shower door that fits over one of my raised beds and acts like a giant cloche.

I also use raised chicken wire to stop cats from digging seedlings up.

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A Year in the Veg Plot

Upside-down wire baskets from old hanging baskets are good placed over plants to protect from vandalising chickens/children.

I have the windscreen's out of waggons placed on top of wooden boards they are nice and thick not as flimmsy as normal glass

I've put spare building site (Heras type) fence panels over the top of my raised beds to keep the rabbits off my overwintering Onions and Garlic! (They're too expensive to buy especially for this job, but were handy at the time!)

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I have two cold frames, one with a sloping front the other is just basically a small raised bed.
Each are about a metre square and made from breeze blocks. They were made to suit two window frames I had lying around which fit over the top.
I also have two wire mesh panels that fit them.

The flat one is a permanent brassica seedbed that gets a soil change each year. Various brassica seeds are started in rows only 4 inches apart with the glass cover on. Once germinated the glass is replaced with the mesh and they stay in the seedbed until planting out time.
The other coldframe is used for seed propagation also, with the glass on. As the plants grow they are moved towards the back where there is more height for growth and some more seeds are sown in seed trays at the front.
When everything has germinated, off comes the glass and on goes the mesh!

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My Majesty made for him a garden anew in order
to present to him vegetables and all beautiful flowers.- Offerings of Thutmose III to Amon-Ra (1500 BCE)

Not perfect, but perfectly acceptable(Snadge)

By the time you've got the hoe from the shed at the end of the garden, you could have hand weeded the area! (Geoff Hamiltom-ish)

I like to use plastic water cooler bottles for larger seedlings,if you cut off the bottoms about 2 ins up the give good pot trays as a bonus.
for whole raised beds I use hoops cut out of blue plastic water pipe covered over with a heavy duty polythene dust sheet or fleece,cheap net curtain material is good too.

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the differance between knowledge and wisdom.
Knowledge.........Knowing tomatoes are a fruit
Wisdom......not putting them in a fruit salad

Where do you pick up the old cooler bottles from?

We use sandcastle flags and little plastic windmills to scare away birds and bunnies- and (so far) deer.They don't seem to work with slugs though- they are clearly braver than I originally presumed!!!
Young seedlings stay near the house until the last frost day has passed.

Old video tape twisted and stretch over the beds. The flashing of the tape and the noise made by the wind keeps birds at bay. Also i have started to collect the old coffee residue from Waitrose and Tesco, they seem happy to get rid of them. They are great for improving the soil and help keep slugs at bay as they dont like them.

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good Diggin, Chuffa.

Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabris, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.

We bent wire coat hangers into hoops and push them in the ground about 18" - 2' apart, spread a long piece of polythene over the top, push another hoop on top of the others so it traps the polythene and pegs down the sides, tie off the ends with bulldog clips - excellent mini poly tunnel for my early peas. It all slides easily up and over the hoops for good weather days, watering and weeding and back down again for cold nights.

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Life is too short for drama & petty things!
So laugh insanely, love truly and forgive quickly!

I have the frames from two old camping wardrobes which place over my beds. Then I cover them with either mesh or plastic for plant protection as required.

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I steal them from work!

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the differance between knowledge and wisdom.
Knowledge.........Knowing tomatoes are a fruit
Wisdom......not putting them in a fruit salad

I also use some water bottle coolers - they are just the right size and strength to cope with fox damage. One day when delivering I asked the supplier if he had any spare and I was told they were getting rid of old and damaged ones so were happy to give me four with the promise of more. Cutting the bottoms off though is not at all easy - they are very thick plastic.

I also lay pea sticks flat on the ground between rows of seedlings to make it difficult for foxes to dig big holes in the fine soil, and disturb the seedlings. This idea also works to stop them digging up potatoes once you have cut the haulms down but have left them to store in the soil.

I've found a company local to Bristol that will sell slightly damaged bottles to me at 50p a go.

If anyone local to Bristol wants the detail send me a PM.

I use old fridge shelves over seed beds to keep the squirrels/foxes/cats/any other digging beasties off until the plants are big enough to fight back.

I have made frames up from blue water pipe and battens. They are made to fit on my raised beds. I just move them to where I need them & drape whatever covering is needed - clear plastic, enviromesh, bird proof netting or fleece.

I had an old clothes airer that i bent in half then covered with strong polythene, works well as a cloche, also a three tiered hanging vegetable rack ( no where to hang it in new kitchen ) now gets used as a 3 tier hanging basket!!

Was taking apart my daughters wooden drawers ( the bits in the middle of drawers were falling through ) and noticed that the front and sides of the actual drawers are a perfect size for raised beds in my border area!! a little bit of weathershield paint and i have ready made mini raised beds!! The main frame i will convert into run for my rabbit.

Did you use new pipe or can you suggest a source for secondhand/seconds

Thanks in advance

either....used is better as its usually free try peeking in skips or wandering past building sites smiling nicely or ask on your local freecycle group

if you have to buy new try a proper builders yard as its cheaper, tends to be expensive on the postage from the web

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The love of gardening is a seed once sown never dies ...