If you’ve ever tried growing fruit, vegetables, or berries in your garden, chances are you’ve had to put in efforts to protect your produce from being eaten but slugs or birds before you get the chance to harvest them.
While netting your produce is the most common way to protect it from birds and pests, it can often feel like an overwhelming job, especially if your plants are growing in an area that’s more difficult to net.
To help home gardeners with this problem, gardener Huw Richards has shared a simple hack he uses to protect his strawberries when he’s unable to net the area.
“Do you grow strawberries? Do you hate slugs eating them? And you hate faffing about with netting? Let me tell you about this great trick that I recently learned from a friend of mine who grows these incredible pest-free strawberries,” Huw said at the start of his TikTok video.
“Now you may be growing strawberries in an area that’s a little bit hard to net, like along a border or in this case, I’m growing strawberries underneath this apple tree…
“Well these organza bags work as a perfect mini net to protect your ripening strawberries.”
“Don’t you just love it when you see a red strawberry, and you pick it and then you turn it around only to find it’s been completely hollowed out by a bird or a slug,” Huw said before holding up the small organza drawstring bags, which are usually sold for as little as 12p each.
“Well, by using these organza bags, which comes in various different sizes and are completely reusable, it means that as soon as you start to see a strawberry is turning colour, put it in a bag to protect it,” he said. “Pull the drawstring in nice and carefully so you don’t accidentally cut the strawberries off.
“And then when it comes to harvest day, you can just pull it out and harvest your berries supereasy.”
He then added: “And it means that you get to enjoy strawberries and not your local blackbird community. And also, if you’re growing strawberries on a very small scale, like in a tub where it doesn’t really make sense to buy some netting, you can use these bags instead. It’s perfect for small scale growing.”
He also said that the organza bags work well for protecting other fruits as well, including red currents and blueberries, which are known to be a favourite for birds to nibble on.
However, if you don’t want to have to put in any effort in protecting your plants from being eaten by birds or slugs, Huw went on to list his three favourite berries to grow that birds and pests often avoid eating.
“The first is gooseberries, birds are just not interested in gooseberries. I think it helps that they’re green,” he said. “The other one is yellow or golden varieties of raspberries, I found those to succeed really well without any protection. And also blackcurrants.
“So try those out and hopefully you’ll get a really nice harvest fruit.”
Taking to the comments, people praised Huw for his simple and cheap hack, with one viewer saying: “Oh I did this with my blueberries this year, worked really well.”
“We have done this for the past two years had amazing results,” another person wrote.
However, a third person argued that it sounded like “more hassle then the netting”.