Garden protection

Match the barrier to the animal, not to the bed

The most common mistake in garden protection is buying a barrier sized to the plot rather than to the animal. Every exclusion method has a specification that decides whether it works, and those specifications are published by cooperative extension services rather than by the people selling the mesh.

Cages and cloches: exclusion by enclosure

For squirrels, chipmunks and birds, a pop-up mesh cage over the bed is the whole answer. The mechanism is trivially reliable — the animal cannot get in — and the only real questions are whether the cage fits your bed and whether the skirt is pinned properly.

Pinning is where these fail. A cage with eight ground stakes stays put; a cage with four over a 39 in span becomes a sail in the first squall, and an unpinned skirt is simply a door. Buy the version with more stakes, or add your own. Plant cages and cloches ranks the picks, all of them by published dimensions where a dimension exists.

Netting: cheaper, but it is not a cage

Netting draped over a bed is cheaper per square foot than any cage and does a real job on birds and on browse. What it does not do is form a rigid barrier: a squirrel will work under a slack edge, and loose netting left unpegged is an entanglement hazard for the wildlife you did not intend to catch.

Use netting where a light drape is genuinely enough — a fruit bush, a short row, winter protection on ornamentals — and use a cage where something is actively digging. Garden netting covers the material, and netting vs cages is the direct comparison.

Rabbits are a fencing problem, not a netting problem

Rabbits are the one garden animal with a clean, published, permanent fix. Colorado State University Extension puts it plainly: chicken wire, hardware cloth or flexible netting at least two feet high, buried four to eight inches, is fairly effective. The burial is not optional — it is the entire difference between a fence and an inconvenience, because a rabbit's instinct is to go under rather than over.

Mesh size matters too. The University of Georgia Extension notes hex netting comes in 1 in and 2 in openings; young rabbits pass a 2 in mesh. If you are going to dig the trench once, dig it for the smaller mesh. Rabbit fencing has the specification and the products that meet it.

The same squirrels, a different target

The animal digging up your bulbs is very often the animal on your feeder, which is why this site covers both. If you are running a feeder within sight of the vegetable bed, spilled seed is subsidizing the population that is eating the garden. Keeping squirrels out of the garden starts there, and the feeder side has the seed-management half of it.