RE: how do you protect seedlings?

 

I have two cold frames made of 3/4 “ cedar, unpainted, sized to fit a couple of old storm windows.  I put them over rectangles of ¼” hardware cloth.  I can use the storms to use these as cold frames, but I also have some bird netting rolled around a wooden dowel, and I can unroll the netting to protect the pots and weight it down at the edges.  This works pretty well; it’s funny how different pests can interfere with iris pots, though.  At my old house, only about six miles from where I am now, I had no trouble with anything tossing the contents of the pots around, but here it’s a different story.  I also never saw snails there, and here, last year, they got most of my iris seedlings in a matter of a few days, before I really even registered them as a threat.

Ken

 

From: iris-species@yahoogroups.com [mailto:iris-species@yahoogroups.com]
Sent: Sunday, March 8, 2015 6:08 PM
To: iris-species@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [iris-species] how do you protect seedlings?

 

 

I usually pot up my Iris seeds in late autumn and set them on the back
porch to stratify naturally through the winter. They get whatever
snow/rain falls naturally & whatever temps happen naturally. Sometimes
I get good germination in spring, but sometimes I have to wait another
season.

My problem lies in small furry critters (cats, squirrels, chipmunks)
knocking over my containers & digging through them. It doesn't happen
all the time, and it doesn't happen to every container, but with this
year's crop of Spec-X seeds I *really* don't want to lose any of them.
(This year I sowed them early & kept them in the refrigerator all winter
& finally set them outside today... now that the forecast shows spring
is here! So anyway, *now* I'm worried about the critters.)

So I'm curious how do you folks prevent critters from messing with your
seedlings (whether in pots or in raised beds, or whatever you may
have)? I'm thinking of building a small chicken coop structure around
them. So I'll probably stop off at Home Depot or something to see what
materials might do the trick. One small complication is that my porch
is triangular shaped. So whatever I build will have to be irregularly
shaped too.

Dennis in Cincinnati

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