Renovating the Fruit Cages

Over the last couple of days, we've been doing some work reconstructing the fruit cages. When we built the raised beds, we put 3" square posts at the corners, 8' tall in the raspberry beds, and 6' tall in the others. We then ran wire between these, and draped bird-proof netting (knitted 1" nylon stuff) over them, secured at the bottom, and sewn together at the seams and ends. It worked really well, from a bird-proofing perspective, but had disadvantages. First, it was a real pain to get in and out of the beds, and so we didn't weed as much as we might. It was similarly awkward to pick the fruit, prune, and mulch. Secondly, the 1" mesh worked really well to catch snow, and the wire supports weren't strong enough to carry the weight of the loaded net, and broke; or, the netting tore under the strain. This meant, every spring for the past few years, having to sew up the netting, and repair the wires, and it all got a bit too frustrating.

As we've been left with quite a lot of spare timber from the construction of, mainly, the wood shelter, which has been lying around, we decided to change how the fruit cages work. We've used some of the 3" laths to build a ring beam around the posts, and across the span in key positions. Onto that, we'll roll a roof of chicken wire, and staple walls of the nylon mesh onto the beam, posts, and raised bed walls. Hopefully, the chicken wire roof will be strong enough to carry a load of snow; the disadvantage is that the mesh is 2", which will be wide enough to allow birds in. We'll see if that's a problem, but if it is, we'll need to place bird net on top of the wire mesh, so we have the strength of the latter, but the bird-resistance of the former.