09/08/2026
🌱🦆Making Row Covers
One of our biggest learning experiences has been effectively keeping pests off our seedlings. For us it is mainly our native wood ducks and cockatoos, but of course this could be different depending on where you live.
CD’s, shiny streamers, those fake birds of prey kites that float around, even boundary netting around rows attached to stakes… None have worked. So we finally took a stab at making these row covers, and we haven’t looked back. Especially because:
It started with the ranuncs, so we netted them. Then they went for the Canterbury bells (which they had previously no interest in) so we netted them. Then they went for the scabiosa, so we netted them….
You get the picture.
We now net pretty much all of our autumn plantings as it’s when the ducks find our seedlings most tasty, or the cockatoos come in and destroy… just to destroy. No rhyme or reason, just snapping stems for what seems like pure enjoyment, or pulling out our tulip bulbs just because they can.
Anyway… we have found this to be an effective, ethical way of keeping all these pests away from the plants and are made from recycled materials and can be reused year after year. Win, win, win!
A bonus perk we didn’t realise until implementing them: they do provide a bit of weather protection, whether that is heavy rains, or more especially, it takes a bit of the brunt off heavy frosts, and while all our plantings are hardy, we find repeated heavy frosts do impact them, so the netting softens the blow a bit.
