This year I discovered the Popadome pest protection covers and they have been amazing! These domed fruit & vegetable net covers are so easy to use, come in a whole range of sizes and are a simple way to protect your fruit and vegetables from garden pests such as slugs, snails, cabbage white butterflies and birds. The green and black colours mean that they blend in well to the garden even if you have got big ‘structures’ in place.
Popadome covers in my garden
The Popadome covers have an easy to assemble framework of fibreglass poles (using the same principle as dome tents for camping). This is covered by a UV stable netting cover with zippered entry and a copper strip at the bottom designed to deter slugs and stop them getting to your precious plants – my overzealous slugs and snails seemed to overcome that barrier though, but the nets were very successful at stopping the birds and the cabbage white butterflies. The bees could still get in easily and I watched several fat bumble bees manoevering their way in without too much difficulty.
The covers come in several sizes that you can mix and match around your garden. You can see the 1.9m x 0.8m version in the left of the picture above covering my strawberries and some herbs. The next size up is 1.2m x 1.2m (currently protecting my winter brassicas), then there is a 2m x 2m version (that was perfect for protecting my tomatoes from the birds this year). And there is 2.5m x 3.5m tree cover.
Protecting winter brassicas
Tomatoes protected from the birds
The tree cover has been an absolute godsend: its size means it can fit over most of my fruit trees (and I’m certainly going to keep them pruned to that size). Rather than a dome shape the tree cover has a slightly asymmetric curve with a flexible pole on the longer side. This means that you can undo the long zipper and use the pole to position the net over and around the tree.
The tree cover fit perfectly over my fig tree and I pulled the bottom drawstring tight and tied the net around the trunk forming a ‘netting bubble’ that even the most determined birds were unable to penetrate. They did still manage to peck a few figs that were on the outer edges but hardly any in the bigger scheme of things. This meant that not only was I able to harvest 99% of my crop of figs, I was also able to leave them on the tree until they were fully ripe – just wonderful!! My persimmon tree is espaliered on the fence but I still managed to erect the tree cover around it – a little trickier to navigate as I had to put the zipper at the fence side but it successfully kept my inquisitive birds away, even those that usually manage to sneak up from underneath and then get caught.
Tree cover over my fig tree
Persimmon protected by tree cover
There are also some fun accessories to give these covers even more flexibility. You can get plastic covers to fit over the top of the 2 smaller domes that turns them into mini-greenhouses, fine mesh insect netting to fit each of the domes and frost protection covers if you live in cooler climes.
A mini-greenhouse with plastic cover
You can get the covers from most garden centres.
I have been looking for something like this for a while, just didn’t know exactly what I was looking for! Thanks Sue
Glad to have helped 🙂
We think Popadomes might work for us.
Our tomato plants are in pots which sit on a clay pavered patio.
How could we anchor one or two Popadomes in this situation?
I also had some of mine on clay pavers and tied some string to the corners of the popadomes and then looped the string around a few extra pavers (you could use anything with a bit of weight).