How will you protect your seedlings?

[Emily Peagram]

Hi everyone,

I hope you all had a brilliant weekend. We're currently working on the February issue, and I know I'm asking you to look ahead, but we would like to know your top tricks for protecting seedlings. This could be from slugs and snails, birds, the elements, anything you've had problems with and how you've gotten around it.

Please note that answers may be used and edited in the February issue of Grow Your Own magazine. I look forward to hearing your tips!

Thanks,

Emily

[Lumpy]

I don't have many as we recently moved but I did managed to bring my garlic, rhubarb and baby perennial flowers with me. The garlic is in pots against a hedge to help protect them from the wind, the rhubarb will be going in soon with a bit of fleece on top and the baby perennials are under a cloche.

[Penellype]

Wow, what a question!

A lot of these methods work for small scale growing at home, but many wouldn't be practical on an allotment.

Slugs and snails
Spray the whole garden with slug nematodes in spring and autumn.
Sow most crops in pots indoors and transplant them out when large enough to survive a small amount of slug damage.
Put containers on copper impregnated slug and snail matting - not great but better than nothing.
Use copper tape around pots, drip trays and shelving legs and put sections of plastic bottle with copper tape on round brasica seedlings when planting out. Never place pots or trays of unprotected seedlings directly on the ground.

Caterpillars, carrot fly and brassica beetles
Cover all carrots and brassicas with insect mesh as soon as they are outside.

Cats, birds
Cover seed beds and onion sets with fleece to prevent being dug or pulled up.
Use "Prikka" strips of plastic with spikes on as a last resort to deter the cat in areas where fleece is not suitable.

Frost
Cover anything vulnerable with fleece or bring indoors when frost is forecast
Harden off seedlings in cold frame or growhouse
Cloche Greenhouses (2ft x 4ft from Wilko) are useful for things like buckets of potatoes, courgette and tomato seedlings until the foliage gets too tall, but need anchoring down well or they will blow away (also make useful net cloches for brassicas etc.).
Use blowaway greenhouse covers supported on stakes pushed well into the ground for taller tomato plants.

Wind
More of a problem with protective structures than the actual seedlings.
Everything is anchored either with house bricks or barbed pegs pushed well into the ground.
If gales are forecast I will clear everything off shelving so that it doesn't blow over. Seedlings may have to live in the garage until things calm down.

Rain/hail
Use self watering pots or trays rather than drip trays where possible to reduce the risk of flooding.
Bring young seedlings inside if possible or protect with insect mesh if heavy rain or hail is forecast.

[Aberdeenplotter]

Yes, it's a big subject. The shame of it is that most of us develop our defence strategies after we experience a problem we didn't realise was there and in that respect, I'm thinking of the horrible club root infestation that I had in my cauliflower earlier this year.. My plot had been used only for growing tatties for around 15 years before I took it on a couple of years ago and I hadn't grown brassicas in the piece of ground affected until this year so that came out of the blue. I'll be coating the roots of my brassica seedlings with a slurry of lime and water in future and liming the brassica patch quite heavily every year as it gets moved around the plot in my crop rotation scheme.

I think most of us are long enough in the tooth to know we absolutely need to use fleece/environmesh to protect against carrot rootfly, leek moth etc, and to net our fruit and brassicas against birds but I was amazed this year to find I had to net my pot leeks because they were being damaged by crows. They were clearly foraging for grubs at the foot of the stems but slashing the leek flags as they tried to get them out of the way. Same crows also decided they had a liking for peas so the peas had to be netted. As can be seen in this pic, they still wanted to get at the peas.. You can see in that photo also that my brassicas have been netted for protection from birds and the cabbage white butterfly.

Slugs as already mentioned by others are problematic and I use pellets and nematodes but in the celery I grow to show, I also use a proprietary liquid application. Slug marks on a head of celery get downpointed so that is an essential. A word of warning though to anyone who wants to take someones else's celery home from a show. Don't be tempted, it will have been treated and that stuff is not for consumption.

Apart from netting around the perimeter to keep rabbits out and high fences to keep out deer and two footed predators, I think that's about my lot.

[Jungle Jane]

This year I planted some onion sets with some netting over the top to protect from birds,then noticed they can land on the net to lower it,to pull out my onion & then leave it there. So I've raised the netting.

[hamamelis]

I have a big problem with bored magpies pulling out (but then leaving) seedlings on my plot. I found that mulching with fresh grass clipping seems to really help. It seems they throw that around a bit, get bored and wander off, never noticing the little seedlings hidden in the pile.

They seem to be attracted by anything new, but tend to ignore the growing plants left behind when the grass clippings wither and dry up.

As for slugs, well, anything and everything. Beer traps, nematodes, even the guilty little pellets sometimes (if only the less toxic ones), going to the plot at night with a torch and confusing the neighbours and picking them off, recruiting a small army of frogs... It's war, I tell you. my plot backs onto woodland, and they reappear from there as fast as I can get rid of them.

[Lisasbolt]

I try to mostly do everything by hand, pick off the caterpillars. Give the neighbour the snails for dinner
bring the seed trays in at night if its really cold. For some really sensitive plants i have a PT in the PT.

[Small pumpkin]

I'm a big fan of nematodes in the raised beds. All seeds are started in the tunnel until they are ready to be planted out. A few things have net cloches over them after planting, until they are a little more established.