Today, we’re going to talk about the question that we get every single season. It usually goes something like, “Why do you plant in cups?” And while it does maybe look something like that, there’s a bit more to the story.
Essentially, we are using solo cups as our protection against voles. Voles are likely familiar to most northerners, but in case the term “vole” isn’t familiar to you, they’re basically like small, northern mice. They have a tendency to inhabit gardens and they really fancy eating plants like peas and brassicas.
These solo cups have the bottom cut out from underneath them and we sort of twist them around our transplants once they’re in the ground. When an unsuspecting vole hits the cup, they bump their little nose and scurry off in another direction. Our solo cups have a 100% success rate of protecting our fresh transplants from those voles!
We protect all of our brassicas with these cups. In general, we’ve found voles have zero interest in things like squash and thus, we don’t use this protection for them. We’ve tried using the cups for pea protection, but haven’t found it quite worth it. It spreads out our planting density too far, thus we end up having less plants than if we’d just let a vole or two snag a couple of our more densely planted peas. Also, we’ve tried both colored and clear Solo cups, the clear ones are much better for long term durability.
We do re-use our cups each year, and we continue to re-use them until they are completely destroyed. While we’d definitely prefer not to use plastic as an input to our garden, it’s a tradeoff we’ve had to make. On the scale of losing valuable plants, using cups and trapping voles, the cups are a good middle ground with exceptional success rates.
At our home, we do perform a lot of vole trapping. This is a controversial topic, of course, and its not for everyone. But, in our opinion, an unmanaged vole population evolves into a complex food web we’d rather try to keep somewhat under control. Voles bring in ermine, which then has a tendency to bring in fox and lynx. So, by actively reducing our vole population, we not only reduce our risk to our garden but also the risks related to fox and lynx predation. (Which tend to also target your unsuspecting little kitties and puppies, or maybe your neighbor’s pets if cats and dogs aren’t your thing.)
This solo cup trick does wonders for protecting your plants from plant predators like voles. It’s a northern trick that was handed down to us, thus we make it a point to hand it down to all of you!
Hope you all are having a good Memorial Day! For us northerners, this weekend often means “planting weekend,” but we hope you also spend a moment remembering and honoring the fallen.
