How to Make a Chicken Wire Garden Cloche
As planting season arrives, it once again becomes important to protect small plants from the chickens' scratching feet and their nibbling on the tender leaves and stalks.
An easy way, of course, is to fence in your entire garden area, or keep your chickens penned up in their run but if you just have individual plants here and there you need to protect, these chicken wire cloches are the answer - and so easy to make.
The chickens clearly aren't big fans of these cloches for obvious reasons, but the cloches do work really well to keep the small plants safe from our little feathered garden marauders!
These are great to keep plants from being trampled by your ducks, nibbled on by bunnies and generally kept safe until they grow a bit larger.
You can also use your cloche to protect a container plant. Just size it to slip over the plant and set it on the dirt in the planter. I use these cloches to protect bushes and shrubs I plant in the chicken run for landscaping also.
How to Make a Chicken Wire Garden Cloche
These chicken wire garden cloches are so quick and easy to make and you can make them in different sizes to fit your various plants and bushes.
If you have extra chicken wire laying around, you can turn it into cloches. And check your thrift store or yard sales if you don't have any forks you're willing to part with.
For a more structured cloche (above), you can wrap the chicken wire around an old tomato cage. In that case, you don't need the forks because the cage stakes will keep your cloche in place. And you can use a length of clothesline for the handle on top instead of the forks.
But it's very easy to style them free form by just curling the chicken wire into a tube.
What you Need for Each Chicken Wire Garden Cloche |
Chicken wire
Four old forks or piece of clothesline
What you Do |
Simply cut a length of chicken wire several inches taller than the plant you wish to protect and long enough that when you form a circle it will encompass the circumference of the plant with room to spare.
Join the length into a tube, bending the cut ends of the wire to secure the tube. Cut a circle out of the chicken wire and, once again, use the cut ends to secure the circle onto the top of your tube.
To make the fork holder and ground stakes | Bend one fork handle in half and then attach the fork to the center of the top of the cloche by bending the tines in opposite directions over the wire.
Attach the remaining three forks to the bottom edge of the cloche. Bend the tines to attach the fork to the bottom edge of your cloche spacing them equidistant from each other. This will allow you to sink the fork handles into the ground to secure the cloche so it won't blow away and the chickens won't knock it over.
I was lucky enough to inherit my Grandmother's silver collection, so I chose to use some of the small forks she left me, instead of standard-sized forks, but any forks will do.
You can often find nice old forks at thrift shops or flea markets. (and before you start typing me a nastygram about 'ruining' good silver, my grandmother was a HUGE gardener and chicken keeper nearly her whole entire life, and was extremely thrifty as well and I know she would be THRILLED about how I was using her silver!
She was not a woman to put on airs in the least bit. She was very thrifty and a big fan of repurposing. So she is likely chuckling right now, in fact, where ever she is, about how her silver is being put to good use.
If you're not the least bit handy, fortunately Gardener's Supply Company sells some really well-made (and cute!) chicken wire cloches HERE.
