My morning garden walkthrough turned up some annoying developments. Something is marauding the garden, nibbling on small leaves or straight up pulling out seedlings and then dropping them. My hog wire dog deterrence system is working for the dogs, but doesn’t seem to be doing much to protect against whatever is pulling out my radish seedlings – except maybe slowing them down. The early peas are looking pretty nibbled down too.

I want to be the one nibbling on my garden plants, dammit.

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I’m thinking my current invaders are probably large-ish birds because where the hogwire is a little higher over the peas, the peas are growing taller with only the tops nibbled off. So whatever this is isn’t going under the wire mesh, it’s standing on it. Plants along the unprotected edges of my horizontal hogwire are being torn up or eaten down to stubs.

The internet recommends wire cloches or netting to defend young plants before they’re strongly rooted enough to resist being pulled out. Scarecrows, reflective streamers, and balloons also help (says the internet). I don’t have those on hand, and I can’t risk waiting for them to arrive (plus wire cloches are like $30 each. Pshaw.) Come to think about, I do have plastic party streamers…

I’m going to hunt around to see what other materials turn up. And possibly repurpose my hogwire fencing to make closed sided cages.

A hunt around the house turned up some black mosquito netting, metal mesh, burlap, and a very tangled nylon trellis net. Untangling a net with toddler helping is… yeah, lets just say it’s “rewarding.”

Not all of this will help with the birds, but it might help me repurpose some of my dog defenses into bird defenses.

In a perfect world, my bird defenses would be like the metal cloche, easy to lift, maneuver, and store for future use. The DIY version might be some wire pyramids, but I definitely won’t have enough of those to defend my whole patch. Here are the prototypes:

I’m liking the small basket the most for this project. It’s very light, and unlike the tunnels, it’s easy to maneuver and set aside. It’s a little too big as it is, so I think I’ll make the next ones closer to the size of one garden square. The material I used for this is called “Double Paper Welded Wire Lath,” and I got mine from Home Depot. I originally bought this to make fence panels to keep the toddler from running into the street (totally worked). It’s been out in all weather for more than two years now and I haven’t seen a spec of rust on it. I’m liking it for my DIY plant cages, but you could also get chicken wire for this.

I clipped the wire with the built in clipper on my needle nose pliers and then bent the edges along the edge of our deck. The pointy bits of wire sticking out after the cuts are done are handy secure the shape of the basket using my needle nose pliers again.

When my wire panels were suspended horizontally above the veggie beds, I had enough wire paneling to defend my whole garden. But if I’m going to be bending it into baskets, I’m not going to have nearly enough material to cover all this space. I’ll be able to cover about half of the surface area that I have covered now, or maybe a little less. Which should be enough to defend the squares that currently have sprouts in them. Plus I’ve got those other materials to fill the gaps. I’m going to need a sunhat and work gloves for this since. The prototypes already drew first blood.

I worked on these baskets throughout the day. The material is wide enough that my baskets ended up being about ten inches tall and about the same area as one of my garden squares. I ran out of time before I’d quite run out of material to finish this project so draped the mosquito netting over undefended squares to protect them until tomorrow. I’ll go back out tomorrow and make several more of the one square cages out of my extra materials and the long tunnels.