Netting

[DIDO.1 22,851]

I'm going to cover my cabbages and carrots in a raised bed...I'm thinking to keep butterflies and carrot root fly out. My raised bed is quite high and I'm worried about wind rocking my cabbages as well.

The bed is in the garden though so it's got to look half decent....any ideas of a cheap mesh???

[Jamie m 668]

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/302119090893

[Paulnix 426]

When you hoe them get a bit of soil around the stem to bank them up a bit as they grow to help support them and give them a bit of air around the roots, as for covering no idea as we grow fields of the damn things but wouldn't fleece do the job ?

[DIDO.1 22,851]

Do you spray them in the fields for Caterpillars?

[Paulnix 426]

We try not too, when we used to grow our own plants in nursery beds it was something we did as routine, made sense to spray an acre patch rather than 20 a week later, now we buy in modules and only spray if we need too, since we went to modules we not had more than a few very small patches so not needed to do, saying that Caterpillar is very easy to kill and the spray is relatively cheap, cheap enough to use as part of a programme rather than need to go over the crop again later.

 

 

* Thinking of it I have the same 2 litre bottles of Decis in my spray store for about 6 years now but I imagine a allotment/Garden would get more Caterpillar pressure than field scale as there are so many options for to encourage butterflies plus of course a small area for them to lay eggs so maybe a 50 over one of our fields we wouldn't worry about but 1 in your patch would decimate them.

Edited May 29, 2017 by Paulnix