These hardware cloth and screen plant covers work well to keep small animals like chipmunks, squirrels, rabbits, and birds from munching on your tender greens. They can also work well to keep Cabbage moths from landing on small cabbages as well due to the small size of the holes, but keep in mind that if you need something to get pollinated, that you would want to remove the cloche to let in the pollinators. 

Step 1: Carefully unroll a 2 ft tall hardware cloth roll a bit at a time (use something heavy like a brick to hold down one end) and measure to a length of about 4ft and 3 inches (or 51 inches or 129.5 cm) and cut with wire snips. Repeat until you have 4 pieces.

Step 2: Take your wirecloth and bend it into the circle, overlapping about an inch. Use the floral wire to “sew” the wire cloth closed (I used a whip stitch for this). Repeat for the remaining hardware cloth you have cut to have 4 tall circles.

Step 3: Unroll your screening and measure and trace on to it circles of about 18 inch (45.72 cm) diameter. Cut out with the scissors

Step 4: place a circle of screening on top of one of your tall hardware cloth circles with an even hang over all the sides, and using the floral wire, use a whip stitch to go around the top of the circle “sewing” to secure top.

End Notes:

Repeat for the other cloches and you have protection that will last for several years. (I have even left them out all winter before and they were just fine!) If you got creative, you could certainly use taller hardware cloth for taller (or wider) cloches as well, although you might want to also use stakes with anything taller than these for stability if you choose to do so. 

I wish I had more images of the how-to process, but I made these prior to thinking of that, but if I ever need to make more, I will be sure to document better! I hope these work out well for you either way :-)

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