Protecting Food From Pests with Homemade Low Hoop Tunnel

Protecting Food From Pests with Homemade Low Hoop Tunnel. Suppliers of plastic-free netting Andermatt Home and Garden in UK https://andermattgarden.co.uk/ Discount code is BYTHER15 for UK buyers.
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About Us.
Byther Farm is a small organic homestead, being designed and managed using permaculture practices. We aim for self-sufficiency in fruit and vegetables for increased self reliance and better resilience to the modern world. I recognise that we are unlikely to be truly self sufficient, but do the best we can. I share our home with my loving husband, Mr J and our cat, Monty.
We are a fifty-something couple who live on a smallholding in Carmarthenshire, Wales. We are going green and creating a gentler, cleaner and more healthy life for our family.
Having had a highly successful smallholding in Monmouthshire, we hope to recreate the abundance at our new home. There will be a large organic kitchen garden with no dig gardening raised beds and young food forest in which to grown our fruit and vegetables.
We keep a few sheep and Aylesbury ducks.

Music from Epidemic Sound.

hello this video is sponsored by andat home and garden and I’ll tell you a bit more about them later on so we’ve got to the time of year where an awful lot of things need sort of protecting if I want to be able to eat them so my strawberries are ripening and the brasas are growing and there are lots of things I want to just protect from uh birds from the cats from butterflies and so in this video I’m going to show you some of the methods I use to protect the crops I’m going to want to be able to eat later in the season on a very regular basis I get asked about the netting and the hoops and the systems that I use in the garden and so in this video I’m going to cover all of those tell you what they are and tell you how I make them I’m Liz zorab and this is by the farm [Music] my strawberry plants are fruiting like mad and oh producing some very beautiful red strawberries excuse me for a minute but because they’re ripening they’re also attracting the attention of a lot of birds who want to come and eat them too so I need to have some sort of netting here that’s raised up a little bit above the plant but also that it’s tight enough over a frame work that the birds can’t land on it and sink down and Peck through the netting and so there are quite a few choices about what sort of framework you want to use now absolutely I should have weeded this bed by now and I should have lifted the strawberries up off the soil to prevent them getting splashed in the rain and I can still do that I can lift each clump of rening fruit and pack some straw underneath it will I have time to do that probably not but it is a really good idea to lift the fruit off the soil so don’t get splashed with mud and also because the fruit is raised up a little bit it’s less accessible to slugs although I think we all know that slugs and snails will just go around or through any straw and get the strawberries if they’re so inclined so framework um these things are great these are little balls uh that have a numerous holes in them at various different angles which you can then use to put uh B Bo canes in and to make a frame and the nice thing about these is it allows you to make a frame any length and any width and any height that you want as long as you’ve got canes that will fit into the holes and then you can put your netting over the top now I’m going to say this on more than one occasion in today’s video if you are netting any fruits or vegetables in your garden you need to make sure that the netting is held down really firmly either using stones or lengths of wood uh or pins a very regular basis because you want to make sure a that it doesn’t get blown away but mostly you want to make sure that birds don’t get in and they’re really good at getting in but they’re not so good at getting out and you don’t want to come out to your garden and find a dead bird trapped in your netting but in this bed I’m going to make a hooped covering and this piping comes in uh blue or black and possibly even yellow and it’s mdp piping it’s available at Builder Merchants but if there’s a building site anywhere near you go and have a chat with one of the builders see if there are any offcuts in mire uh we went to a solar farm that was being built and asked them if they had any piping and indeed they let us have lots and lots of it which was brilliant so it comes in different widths this one is a 20 mm poly pipe it says on it this piping is going to work really well for me uh I’ve also got some that’s bigger which I would guess would be something like 32 mil and also a really big one it’s 63 mm I’ve cut them into lengths I’ve cut them into kind of as long as my arm I have got some piping that’s considerably longer and some that are shorter so that I can get different heights tunnels in my garden but now I need to fix them into the ground and there’s two ways of doing that you can have a bamboo cane uh which you push into the ground or a piece of something like rebar which you you can put into the ground and then the pipe goes on the top of it but the way that I prefer to do it is to have a piece of pipe and to put this into it because to me that seems to make it much sturdier the pipes that I use are recycled so I keep an eye out on our local advertising P Pages things like Facebook Marketplace and free cycle uh for anybody who is getting getting rid of children’s trampolines and the legs are very often just km in in segments and the legs are really nice and wide so you can use those for the much wider tubing uh this is from the poles that go around the top of a trampoline and we’ve just cut them to the to a length that we want and then the next thing I need to do is it’s not rocket science this it’s really very simple it’s I just literally bang them into the ground now you can put a piece of wood over the top to stop damaging the uh top of the pipe and it won’t go in any further cuz I think I’ve hit a stone so now I’m going to repeat that and on this bed because it’s not going to full length because there’s a tree there so if this was a full length bed which is uh 36 M long uh I would normally put in four um but because it’s going to be that bit shorter I’m just going to put in three and the next thing I do is take the piping and put it in one side and put it into the other side and you can see here because it’s quite a short length of pipe I’m actually getting a really low Archway across this bed and that’s what I want I don’t need it to be really high up I’m setting the poles in from the edge of the bed a bit so that I’ve room for the nesting to go down and a piece of wood to run along here the next thing to do is to work out what sort of netting you’re going to put over your structure and the kind of netting you use really will depend on what you’re using it for so if you’re trying to exclude butterflies like I do with my cabbages you’re going to want something like a soft butterfly netting if you’re just trying to exclude the birds you could use a bird netting which has a much larger hole in it now I don’t have any bird netting I only have either the soft butterfly netting or something new that I found this year and I’m really excited about so back in January I was scrolling around I was looking for an alternative to plastic netting and I found this this looks like uh a plastic it almost feels like a plastic but it’s actually a plasticfree netting uh made from plant materials and it’s made by andat Home and Garden they’ve been around for of 30 or 40 years and they produce masses of organic plastic-free and Wildlife friendly products uh all sorts of things from uh biological control of pests to this fabulous uh netting and even plastic free fleece they do two different weights of fleece 18 G and 30 G and the lighter weight one protects your plants down to minus one and the heavier weight down to something like minus five or six and so you’d use those uh on cool nights when you bringing your seedlings along or if there is a frost threatened you can pop those over your plants to help protect them and you could also use that fleece around the edges of beds to protect against carrot root fly because uh as long as you’ve got it at least 18 in high carrot root fly will have to fly up and over it and they’ll miss your carrots anyway so for strawberries usually you would want to use a netting that would allow insects through to pollinate the flowers but in that particular bed all I’m doing is protecting it from birds eating those berries there’s very few flowers left so I’m not really worried about insects being able to get in to pollinate those so I’m actually going to use this very fine uh plastic free netting isn’t this great it’s very finely woven uh so it will protect against all sorts of bugs including carrot root fly I had no idea when I bought this first piece of netting uh back in January how much uh I would like and mat’s products I like the ethos of the company I like their approach to their products so now I’ve done that I’m thinking I probably do want to put in a support across the middle just to keep the netting raised up let me go and see what I can find well I’ve got these bits of metal from a a previous frame being very careful not to stand on the strawberries will that fit on there that would be useful if it did or when it’s almost the right length uh well I’m going to bend that one in T oh that’s nicer let’s try and see if there’s another one hoay I found another one now normally I would use bamboo canes um and for a fine netting like this I would actually suspend the bamboo cane underneath the hooping rather than on top so that the netting didn’t catch on any of the leaf joints of the bamboo bamboo and I would put uh some sort of cane topper on each end to stop the bamboo from poking through the netting W now that one’s too long so it’s going to go underneath and I’m going to tie it to the frame here and again I’m tying it underneath to to stop the netting C matching on the ends okay here we [Music] [Applause] [Music] go excellent this should protect my strawberries until I want to eat them so the next thing I’m going do is I’m just going to gather at the ends and I’m going to use a metal a large metal staple to pin the bit I’ve gathered into the ground that makes the first end secure it’s one of those jobs that just takes a bit of time and just needs to be done carefully to actually have maximum benefit I’m going along making sure there’s no strawberries sticking out of the netting in your go strawberry inside the netting and you can see now why I put the posts further in so I can bring a piece of wood and put it along here to seal those sides and again I’m tying the ends with some string but you could use uh baning twine or a cable tie and then I’m pinning that down so I want to make sure that the netting goes all the way to the ground all the way around so I’ll need to weigh it down on these sides to find out more about andat visit their website andat garden. co.uk or if you’re going to gardeners world live in Birmingham between the 13th and 16th of June and why not go and visit them they’ll be in Hall 18 at stand 264 and on Thursday I’ll be there with them from 10:30 to 11:30 and also from 1: until 2: and if you’re not going gardeners worlds live don’t worry you can visit their website and use the code byther 15 for 15% off any of the [Music] netting I’m very pleased to say that I have finally cleared the bed here which I’ve been promising to do for nearly 2 years uh so it’s now all cleared and Weed Free and I’ve planted it up with brasas there’s still one more cauliflower to go in but I’ve got some uh White sprouting broccoli uh some brussel sprouts seavoy cabbage and then the collie will go in as well it’s got the mdp piping this is the quite a thick one and that’s gone into the sections of leg from a trampoline um we cut into uh sizes are probably 30 to 40 cm long uh and then banged into the ground it forms a fairly sturdy and steady support for the netting uh there’s enough flexibility for it to give in the wind and not break but it’s also pretty sturdy in terms of supporting The netting The netting is not going to go anywhere near the brasas so if you have brasas use a sturdy mdp piping or if you have bamboo canes you can use those with the balls to create a frame for your netting to go on make sure it’s well away from the leaves so butterflies can’t land on it and lay their eggs through the netting and once you’ve used your andat netting or fleece you can either keep the paper bag for storing in uh over winter for next year or you can just recycle it I’ll leave links for the websites in the UK and elsewhere in the video description and I’ll also include those details of that discount code and if you’d like to see how I created a walk-in brass cage from recycled items I’ll leave a link on the screen and in the video description just click on the link and that’ll take you straight through to the video