Easy Tomato Protection

My backyard is a vibrant and active environment for wildlife.  Normally I like that, but there is one front for which I am constantly fighting nature:

My tomatoes.

This is the second time I have tried to grow tomatoes in my home garden.  The first time I had a lovely Roma tomato plant, that made lots of nice looking fruit.  I got none.  Every single fruit was stolen before it reached maturity.  So this year, I vowed to keep as many tomatoes as I could.  At one of the many baby showers thrown in my daughter’s honor, I received some mesh bags that are supposed to be used for car storage, and thought they would make great tomato protectors:

I simply draped the bag over the tomato cluster and loosely pulled the drawstring.  This particular bag has been in place a couple of weeks, and with no input from me, has kept every tomato inside safe!  My only concerns with these bags are that 1) they are kind of heavy and drape onto the tomatoes and 2) I only have 4, so if I have more than 4 tomato clusters growing at once I’m going to have a problem.  So I decided to take some discount scrap tulle I had and make some better tomato protectors:

Easy as pie – I just stitched two sides, turned it right side out, and then turned over the top once and stitched a pocket.  I didn’t even worry about hemming because I don’t really think it’s going to unravel.  I then used a safety pin to run a piece of yarn through the top and voila! a drawstring bag.  Of course I immediately had to go try it out:

before

after

I like the new bags because they are appropriately sized and are light enough to stand up and not drape on the tomatoes.  What have you done to protect your tomatoes?  Let me know with a comment!