Home-made butterfly defences

The things I need to make my homemade defences against butterflies finally arrived in the post - garden netting and string. I lashed sets on three sticks together with the string to make arches:

Lashing

Then I put a row of them into my veg patch, along the line where I wanted to sow my brassicas (cauliflower, cabbage and swede). The rising height is more due to inexact stick-breaking than intent.

I planted the brassica seedlings along the tunnel. I'm not sure how well the swedes will do, they were particularly rootbound, and I think I ended up snapping a lot of each individual plant's roots when I separated them because they were so intertwined - most of them had grown roots at most of the way down the length of the pot. That's the price of buying seedlings on special offer because they're past their best-before date and leaving them several more days while you wait for butterfly defences to arrive. Still, at 50p per pot of seedlings, it was worth a shot.

Rootbound swede seedlings

I then planted the lot in the space down the middle of my stick arches and covered the whole lot in netting, which I weighed down with some of the pieces of stone at strategic points along the whole length and at each end.

Home-made netting tunnel , and slug rings

The idea is that so long as the leaves of the plants don't touch the sides of the netting, butterflies won't be physically able to get to them to lay their eggs on them. No butterfly eggs = no caterpillars. No caterpillars = half decent chance of being able to eat the veg myself.
The last time I grew a brassica (broccoli), there were so many caterpillars they covered about half the surface of each of the plants, making them pretty much inedible (I decided that picking 10-15 caterpillars off per floret was too much like hard work, and quite aside from that, too gross). Don't worry about the local butterflies. Both my next-door neighbours have large buddleia plants in their gardens and butterflies thrive on the stuff. All I'm doing is using a bit of netting to make sure they choose the buddleia not my veggies to feed their babies on.

Buddleia

In case you're wondering what the copper-coloured rings are around some of the plants, they're exactly what they look like - copper rings. I got them from Slug Rings. The idea is that if you use them properly (make sure there aren't any slugs or slug eggs inside them to start with and that there aren't any gaps under them or bridges over them (e.g. leaves drooping over them), they protect the plant inside from slugs. The people who own the company are actually the parents of a friend of mine, so I've seen them work, but I've yet to prove that I can use them successfully. Watch this space for further news.