So this is about covers, in this case, mesh. It's a woven,
nylon
thread quite close spacing. It's
the standard enviromesh,
original mesh cover and why to
use covers like this and
when and over which vegetables and there's a nice selection here and
the covers are for - the cover is for different reasons. So for example here,
French beans was rabbits.
Not actually now, but it's kind of easier to cover the whole bed when they're small.
We've got quite a few rabbits here, and
they love to eat the little leaves of the seedlings and you can lose your plants quite quickly.
Now they'll be alright and
it may not be that long before we take this cover off, but there's one or two things where it's still really benefitting, like kale,
a brassica, so it's keeping off the summer insects like the butterflies and
to some extent the flea beetles. I find though, it doesn't totally keep flea beetles off.
it makes a very worthwhile difference, but not 100%.
And then new planting of endive.
Rabbits love them. They love the new seedlings more than anything and they love endive and chicory actually more than lettuce even, but
when I first planted the lettuce beyond the endive nearer to you as small seedlings, they pretty much disappeared overnight.
That was before I had the cover on and because the rabbits have been breeding recently and they suddenly appeared.
So the lettuce have really benefited, but at this stage
here we find they don't eat them so much now and beyond that you can see some carrot seedlings coming up between
the furthest lettuce, which have almost finished cropping and
again rabbits really like that. So in this case, it's rabbits and insects. And there's one particular insect, which I'll mention here,
and that's something called gall midge.
And it's over swedes in this case. So these are swedes transplanted
uh, three weeks ago here following peas for shoots and
what I find is, if I don't keep the cover in place, in fact,
it's happened there. It's either that or a rabbit, but I think it's the gall midge probably.
And it eats out the heart leaf of the
growing plant and that means that the plant for awhile loses the ability to grow until it can make side shoots.
And the swede just doesn't develop as a big root, you can get quite a stunted, much smaller swede. These look fine.
I don't mind losing one that often happens.
And uh, you can see other insect damage here, but that actually I'll worry about less. It's just that eating out of the heart.
So just on certain occasions, it's good to know specifically what pests you need to worry about and
another one is,
later in their life, is carrot root fly and I can show you over here the result of using mesh on larger carrots.
This bed has been covered since we sowed the carrots on
19th of March
and
initially the cover was fleece,
which is much warmer than mesh.
So, in the spring I
actually use mesh very little. And there are,
generally speaking, less insects at that time of year.
So we swap the fleece for mesh after about
seven or eight weeks, once the carrots have really got going.
It was carrots and radish, actually.
Had a nice crop of radish as well. And now we've been harvesting the carrots for
five or six weeks and
then make little holes where harvest left a
gap to pop in a Brussels sprout plant.
So that's what's going on here - an overlap of plants, intercropping the Brussels between the carrots. And fairly soon
the final carrot harvest will happen and then it will be a bed of just Brussels sprout for the late autumn and winter harvest.
So it's very productive in that, not adding any compost at any stage except at the beginning.
I'll just show you the carrots and how
they're pretty nice and how well it's working with the mesh over because the -
it is keeping off the carrot root fly, which is little fly that you don't often see just flying around and
it lays its eggs on the soil and then they,
larvae, burrow down and eat the carrot and at this time of year that can really cause quite a bit of damage.
You see these are lovely and clean they're coming out so clean, in part because it's no dig with
initial compost layer, and then because it dries well. And we are watering, not the carrots,
but we've been giving water to the Brussels sprout because that needs it. But the mesh is basically serving dual purposes,
keeping insects, the carrot fly, off and it's keeping the Brassica insects and butterflies off the Brussels.
And
there may be one or two holes - all, all my mesh covers - I haven't bought any mesh for three or four years now,
which is why as we saw the gall midge damage to the swede, there was a little hole actually in the mesh,
and it's still okay. It's mostly working. But as they get older, you get a little bit of degradation and
I've got some some mesh covers at 10 years old now and they're still working more or less.
There comes a time there when maybe you do need to change them.
Water goes through so you don't need to worry about
extra watering or anything. Light levels, good at this time of year. There's plenty of light.
So, the covers have a lot to recommend them from that point of view.
And, we'll just have a look at two other crops which benefit and also
the snag that can happen from holes in the mesh.
The beds I'm covering here
have an older planting and a newer planting and this
older planting is of cabbage
which followed broad beans in fact, so there were broad beans growing here until
13th of June, which is a month ago and
after cutting them off at the ground we planted cabbage.
So these have been in just over four weeks and all the time they've had mesh on. And when they were small
they had hoops supporting the mesh because
this mesh can get quite heavy particularly when it's wet. In wet weather I have
seen some quite bad damage when it's sitting on plants -
seedlings, that is. But once the plants get to this
size and as we saw as the carrots before they're strong enough that they can just support the mesh
themselves so you don't need hoops anymore. I mean carry on with it was if you want we actually haven't got enough hoops, so -
what we did this week just three days ago, we harvested potatoes here and
on the same day we planted these leeks.
And before putting the cover on we moved the hoops that were here to this bed. So when the leeks are small
the hoops are bearing the weight of the mesh.
These are multi-sown leeks, by the way, that were sown three months ago.
And later on the leeks will be able to support the weight of the mesh as they push it up.
And again, this is this is older mesh even actually than what we saw before. There are some holes you and
a few insects do find their way through, and I can just show you here
what happens. I'm just keeping an eye on these plants actually because,
in case a
caterpillar
does
become visible. And, on Thursday, three days ago, I did find in here - you can see this plant very eaten -
two big,
brown caterpillars, A guy who was helping, he said he recognized them, he said it was the Angle Shades moth.
And a lot of damage is done by moths, more than butterflies. And moths tend to fly at night.
You don't see them, so you're not really aware of them. And that's what the cover is on for - the leeks -
it's called leek moth.
It's little brown moth again that you probably never see.
But it comes at night and it lays its eggs in the heart of the growing leek,
usually in August, but we're ready for it, by getting the cover on before. And
the little maggot, or larvae, chews out the developing leaves of the leek plant.
So they kind of, for a while, they look okay.
It's not the outer leaves getting eaten and then you suddenly realize they're not growing. And so keep an eye out for that one.
We've got it here at this region southwest England, quite a lot of southern England, I think, has leek moth. I'm not far -
I'm not sure how far north it has got. If you haven't got it then fine. You wouldn't need to cover your leeks.
So that's the thing about using covers like this. You know, it's just being aware of
what might happen the potential damage, and covering accordingly, and just for the length of time that's needed.
So here for these cabbage, for example, the this variety is called 'Filderkraut' and it can get really tall.
When the hearts start developing the cabbage plants to be up here.
And that will mean that I don't then have enough mesh. This cover's not wide enough,
it's just a 2 meter wide mesh. And if you get crops growing up tall and then
you have, suddenly you haven't got a cover at the side, because this all got used up by the crop pushing it up. And then
the insects just fly in.
So it won't be long before we actually just take this mesh off here.
And then I keep the caterpillars at bay by spraying Bacillus thuringiensis.
Which is a soil bacteria. It's a natural product.
You can buy as a powder,
spray it on Brassica leaves every 20 days roughly 18-20 days.
I've done any spraying yet,
but it won't be long now. And that, it just makes the leaves indigestible to caterpillar so that that's an alternative to
using mesh. And you could have a wider mash and just keep it covered all summer.
I actually quite seeing like seeing my plants, that's one downside of a mesh is the garden looks a bit sort of white and
It's prettier when you can see the plants.
And we'll finish off looking at one or two other aspects of of using mesh covers.
The cover we put on here, the mesh cover -
at the time of planting, which was thirteen days ago,
I'd run out of hoops. So, we thought well, we've got to get it on because this is chicory. And
rabbits love chicory, seedlings particularly.
So it just went straight on the quite small seedlings and you can see now it's - it's not
too bad in terms of the weight,
partly because it's been mostly dry weather. We've just be watering through it every two or three days.
But the the plants are fine, actually. I would just have been happier to have had some hoops. And
definitely if it had been wet weather, I don't think this would have worked. This chicory and kale up there,
you see how the kale is pushing up a bit more strongly than the chicory.
But these will be fine and we're just going to keep this cover on,
like this, or we might put some hoops in even now, actually. We'll see how it goes.
Finally I'll show you the different kind of cover that you can use in summer and for a different reason.
So this bed has lettuce which we planted 20 days ago.
They were 24 day-old seedlings and
then the weather got, for us, unusually hot and
over the Solstice, just after the Solstice,
really strong Sun in our terms. And we found that even with watering
every two days, say ,that it was difficult to keep enough moisture around the roots of newly transplanted seedlings.
When they get older - like these lettuce plants,
although they're smaller, they're much older -
they were sown February, planted March and we've been picking them every week and we recently picked them. That's why they're still quite small.
But they've got a much stronger root system an older plant like that and so they can tolerate
the drying out a little bit on the surface, whereas these ones haven't yet got their roots down quite so much and
need more regular watering when they're small and
this leads me onto the cover because
what we find now and with with summer plants, and lettuce almost exclusively not anything else really
because they're so watery, you know it's all about water really, with lettuce.
A cover like this can just keep the fiercest of the sun and the light off while they're
developing. So that's nearly three weeks now and you can see how they've grown
really well. They look lovely. They look lush.
That is from watering three times a week pretty much, but it hasn't rained at all.
And I'm now taking the cover off. And this cover is something called Thermacrop. I
would have used mash if I'd had enough - we ran out of mesh.
It's all this extra covering against sun. And so, I thought well I had this - it's sold as a fleece alternative, so
you know, it's kind of a warmth retaining material a little bit, but not as much as fleece, I find.
I find fleece is warmer than this one.
It has got more ventilation. And it has really worked well for the lettuce. So that's Thermacrop,
there's another option. And then you could use that in spring. We find it works not bad.
I still prefer fleece as I say but
it does serve as a
cover for spring crops to keep the cold winds off particularly.
We've also got this one on some French beans up there. And it, again, iIt's been working really well for them.
So there you have it. I hope you've enjoyed seeing
some different covers and of different ages, different supports, different crops, different timings how you can
easily and quickly put them on and then take them off again.
And just being on it a bit.
And how much it unlocks the potential of summer because if you get pests eating things really that - end of story
So check out the covers and have fun using them.