Building a better fruit cage

Fiona and Hugh Osborne extensively use fruit and vegetable cages to protect valuable crops.

- Fiona and Hugh Osborne

As soon as we started growing significant quantities of fruit and vegetables, we found that lots of other creatures liked them too! We lost entire crops of cabbages to caterpillars, berries to birds and even strawberries to mice and voles. Whilst we found it possible to pick off occasional caterpillars, the the more crops we grew, the harder that job became. Running around waving our arms at birds eating our blackcurrants wasn’t effective for even a small number of bushes and canes. As we expanded our activities, we realised that we needed to take action as our losses were unsustainable. We did talk to farmer friends as to what they used. At the time insecticides were widespread in protecting brassicas. Whilst that seemed an easy solution, we were slightly alarmed about the warning on some long-lasting treatments such as “If you use this stuff, you must plant out using gloves as it’s dangerous if you get it on your skin”. The idea of not touching the food that we intend to eat later because of the toxicity of the treatment just wasn’t for us so we decided to look for other solutions. Ultimately, we settled on physical barriers in the form of fruit and vegetable cages.

ROW COVERS

Our first experiments in crop protection followed the approaches common to most gardeners and allotmenteers, net supported on hoops to cover annual crops of cabbages, cauliflowers and over young lettuces and peas to keep the dratted wood pigeons off! These systems work well and have the great advantage of being cheap, simple to install and easy to move from place to place.