Question about protection

Hi all,

I'm a newbie here; I have built 2 - 4x4's with their grids and am ready to fill them this weekend (have my soil too ) and start to plant!

My question is about protection (from cats and squirrels now, chickens soon...). I was planning on building the chicken wire cages that are described in the book. But I was at a gardening store this weekend and saw that they used bird netting instead, which seemed a lot easier. Also, both 4x4's are going to have vertical trellises, and the cages won't work with them, I realized...

Is the netting enough protection? We are going to be getting chickens this spring too, and I am not sure if the netting will protect the garden from them... Does anyone have experience in this?

If there are specific ways that people have succesfully rigged this netting, I'd love to see pictures -- I'm a visual learner . I already build 2 - 4x4 (1"x1") frames that I was going to attach chicken wire to for the cages, and was trying to figure a way to use the netting with these...

Thanks!

Melinda in San Antonio

I had a problem with my 2 outside cats, getting in/using the squares that had nothing growing. I just took the netting and threw it over the beds. The seeds I'd planted, collards, mustard greens, came up and grew thru the netting. The onions and garlic came up and raised the netting up too. Chickens will have to have wire to keep them out. I put a fence around all the beds for the rabbits and chickens. The chickens wings had to be trimmed so they could not fly over the fence.

Don't know if the netting will keep the squirrels out, I don't have a problem with mine, guess I don't grow anything they like!

I had a similar problem last year. After trying many other methods, the only thing that ended up working was making a last minute fence out of conduit and bird netting with pink ribbon at the top so no one ran into the netting.



It was pretty flimsy, but it worked really well. It kept out the deer, cats, rabbits, and small children (and even my mother-in-law, lol, because she couldn't figure out how to get in). I plan on replacing the bird netting with something sturdier this year though.

Thanks for these responses. Since I have some chicken wire, I'm going to investigate how I could use it to erect a fence ... though I do like the idea of using conduit and bird netting... I'll keep pondering. Thanks for the input.