Netting The Fruit Trees

Realise my massive mulching efforts were a bit of a waste of time in that all the weeds have still come up. I was so focussed on not laying the mulch too thick that I have made it too thin and need to do the whole thing again which is a bit frustrating. Never mind, I will finally get the hang of it and plus it is all good exercise and involves lots of bending so will be great for the body as well as the garden!

We had the fun games of trying to net our beautiful fig tree last night, so that the cheeky birds don’t make off with all our juicy fruit. With some home made netting poles (good work Bloke) we stretched the net over the top of the tree and then realised we’d bought a net that was too small, no matter how much we pulled! So plan B was to put the net over the nectarine tree which also has some nice plump fruit growing on it and we are going to go back to the hardware store (sometimes feel Bunnings is our second home) and buy the extra large net instead.

After a few rows whilst trying to cover the tree in the large net, we realised that working as a team was causing a fair few arguments, so I wrapped the net around the fig tree myself. This still left the entire top of the tree uncovered so it was back to Bunnings for more netting and another afternoon trying to get the damn thing on.

Finally we got the whole tree protected, with the thanks of a heap of pegs off the clothes line.

Our little fig looks like some kind of alien spaceship but at least it is now protected from the birds. We realised that all up we had spent about $50 on netting and hours of time getting this task complete, it might have been easier just to buy a whole heap of fresh figs from the market! Anyway, I’m sure it will be worth it in the long run.