I haven't tried that product and don't know anyone who has so cannot comment specifically on it.

If I had lightweight row cover, I'd try it first before spending money on something else. When a product is fairly new on the market, I tend to wait, at least about 90%of the time, and see what other people say after they've tried it. If it gets good reviews from people who grow in a climate similar to ours and if I think it would be cost-effective, then maybe I'll buy it and use it. One exception to that was when DeWitt came out with a frost blanket type floating row cover that gives 10 degrees of protection. Since I had prior experience with using row covers that gave 4-8 degrees of protection, I didn't hesitate to buy the new 10 degree stuff, and used it last year and it was wonderful. From now on, when I have to replace floating row cover, I'll only buy the kind that offers 10 degrees of protection. I mainly use row cover in winter/early thru mid-spring and late fall for frost and freeze protection. I generally don't use it to keep pests off plants, but on the rare occasion when I do, I use Agri-bon 19.

I doubt it ever will be cost-effective for a home gardener to use something as pricey as Proteknet.To me, that's the sort of financial investment I might be willing to make if I was a market gardener who grew stuff to sell and who had to raise a specific amount to break even and make a profit. I'm not sure I'd spend that kind of money to keep squash bugs or SVBs off my plants in an ordinary home garden.......but then, in a bad grasshopper year, if it would keep hoppers off the plants, I might think it was worth it. Keep in mind that grasshoppers have been known to eat holes in row covers and in fiberglass window screens, so even Proteknet might not stop them. It is hard to stop a hungry grasshopper, or 10,000 hungry hoppers.

Remember that when you use row cover, you need to plant your squash in an area where squash was not grown the previous year. Otherwise, you are likely to have overwintering pests hatch out underneath your row cover.

I primarily grow C. moschatas and never have covered them. It simply isn't necessary if the issue is Squash Vine Borers. The moschatas have solid stems that the SVB larvae cannot tunnel through. I've rarely lost a C. moschata plant to diseases spread by squash bugs either. I might lose an occasional leaf to a disease spread by squash bugs, or a handful of leaves, but I've never lost a plant, I've been growing Seminole for about a decade and I don't know if I've ever just flat out had a Seminole plant die. Usually the plants still are green and growing and setting new fruit when the first hard killing freeze of fall gets them, and I don't give them any special treatment.

With squash that are not C. moschata, I just succession crop so that if SVBs or disease take out a variety of summer squash, I have new plants coming along to replace them. Some years we have huge numbers of squash bugs and some years we have none, so some years are great squash years and other years are not so great.

Thanks Dawn for your input! This is my first year to grow anything in this area of the yard, and I already have light weight row cover material I intend to try first. Just wanted to get all the information I could, I don't recall reading about Proteknet last year so I thought I'd ask. I grew 1 zucchini and 1 yellow squash last year, covered with wedding tulle.. Lol it worked great until I forgot to recover after hand pollinating one day.. That's all it took, SVBs got both of them before I recognized the frass (last yr was my 1st yr gardening.) I am growing a few C. moschata this year, but I found a few other pumpkins/ winter squash I want to try too.. Honestly, I may have gotten slightly carried away buying seeds but oh well, that's part of the fun I guess. :) We shall see if I can stay on top of the squash pests this year, I'm only about 30 miles from what is considered a plague zone for SVB?(according to my sister in Norman)

By the way, I don't know if my sister ever figured out my username on here, but she contacted you and gave me a "Road-trip coupon" to garden a day with OkieDawn as my Christmas present! I just wanted to say thank you for agreeing to it! Its the most thoughtful, special gift I think I've ever received.. My oldest sister (also an avid gardener and member to the forum) is terribly jealous lol. It is very generous of you to offer your time to a couple of strangers, I just wanted to say Thank you and I look forward to meeting you sometime soon!

Alexis, You're welcome.

I think that Proteknet is fairly new. I don't think I'd ever heard of it before last year, and the folks talking about it last year were market gardeners.

Johnny's Select Seeds has it in their catalog, and I suppose that is where I saw the price and wondered who could spend that kind of money on netting. Of course, it was in huge rolls, so that makes the price sound really high too, but you're getting a lot of it. It could be the best insect netting around, but that still doesn't necessarily make it cost effective for a home gardener.

The whole issue with forgetting to cover up the plants after hand-pollinating is what makes raising non-moschata type squash plants so trying. Also, sometimes I think they get under the netting while you're standing right there hand-pollinating.

I always get carried away when buying seeds and planning my garden. It is part of the fun of doing it. I am not a woman who has a closet that is filled with too many shoes or purses, but I do have a seed box that is huge and always overflowing. I always want to grow so much more than I actually have the room to grow. My seed addiction is severe.

The plague zone for SVBs is pretty much everything from zone 6 southward because they overwinter,come out early and have multiple generations. I am not certain if they are as bad in zone 5 and northward, but in the colder parts of the country, there's usually only one generation of them so once they hit you can replant and hope to get a harvest before frost arrives.

I don't know if your sis ever figured out your user name either. (grin) I'm looking forward to meeting y'all this spring.

I hope you aren't going to be disappointed with my garden when you see it. It is just a bunch of rows of plants, and it rarely achieves the vision of perfection I have in my mind. However, it does have its days where it looks pretty good and I am pretty proud of it on those days.

If we are lucky, there won't be any snakes in there with us that day, and if we are even luckier, maybe the fire ants will be lying low. Since we raised the fence higher a few years ago (Tim's best friend started calling it The Prison Garden after we raised the fence to 8'), as long as I remember to close the gates, there's almost never any deer or bobcats in it any more, and we haven't had cougars near it (as far as we know) since that horrible summer of, I think, 2008. Or, maybe it was 2009. Either way, they haven't returned to our yard but once since then, and I missed that sighting. (A neighbor on her way to work told me about the one in the driveway by my garden that was walking from our place towards hers a couple of years ago.)

There's actually five separate garden spots, four of them fenced, so there should be a lot to see...Lord willing and if the creek don't rise! With everything the weather does to us around here, about the only thing that hasn't happened to my garden is that the creek hasn't risen high enough to flood it. Yet.

I suppose if making a nice garden here in OK was easy, we wouldn't appreciate what an achievement it is to have a beautiful and productive garden despite the weather. To me, a person who has any gardening success at all here in this state truly is an accomplished gardener, even if they are relatively new to gardening. There are so many different challenges here, and often a bunch of them hit all at once. If someone can garden in Oklahoma, they can garden anywhere.

Dawn

Hello! I fully recognize this is an old thread, but, in the hopes you may get notified of a response, thought I'd offer another suggestion. There's a product I've purchased off Amazon, not inexpensive, but in smaller, more manageable sizes, that I believe may be the equivalent of Johnny's Proteknet. I used it with great success over my eggplant mini-hoop house last year in an area where the Colorado potato beetles stripped a 30' row of potatoes in a single day. It also kept flea beetles off radishes! At $17, it may be worth a try!

Tierra Garden 50-7000 Haxnicks Micromesh Prepack Blanket

Hello - I checked out the product above online, and it is reported to have the oddest dimensions. Blanket is 16.5 feet long and X 5.8 Inch wide.

How did you cover anything with a blanked that is only 6 inches wide?

Thanks!

I checked the product on Amazon and the dimensions said 198 X70X25 inches. Obviously something wrong with that. So probably a typo.

I think that 5.8" should be 5.8', which would be about 70".

I love the idea of growing everything edible under netting that would keep the pests off of it, but the price of Proteknet (as sold at JSS in large pieces) is daunting. In reading some of the reviews of the netting above on Amazon, some people said the holes in the netting were too large and let some insects get through. If I am going to go to the trouble to put hoops and netting over something, I am going to want that netting to exclude all the pests.

elenacday, I am SO sorry for the late response. While looking to purchase more of the "Micromesh," I came across your note. The measurements on the package I have of the Haxnicks Micromesh are as follows: "1.8m (5ft 10in) wide 5m (16ft 6in) long." It appears the item has either become more desirable or less available, as the price has more than doubled since March 2016. The packaging states it is a 0.6mm mesh and is UV stabilized. "Protects against carrot fly, butterflies, leafminers, pea moth, cutworm, aphids, onion fly, flea beetle, caterpillars, vine weevil, birds, slugs & animals."

I bought some Micromesh from Territorial Seed in the spring and used it. I also found Proteknet netting in small pieces (so glad because I did not want to invest a ton of money in a huge roll without testing a smaller piece of it first) and used it. I used both of them in spring to keep cabbage worms and cabbage loopers off my broccoli, cabbage and other brassicas. They worked perfectly! In comparing the two, I believe I even like the Micromesh better than the Proteknet product. I used them in the early summer to keep squash pests off the zucchini and squash pests. I think they worked fine, but it is hard to say because neither Squash Vine Borers nor squash bugs showed up (yet) in my garden this year, so eventually I removed the netting from the squash plants as the plants outgrew it. It is possible the squash pests came around early in the season while the plants were covered, and simply moved on because they couldn't penetrate the netting and get to the plants. It also is possible that this is just one of those good years here where the squash pests, for whatever reason, don't show up. We get that about 1 or 2 years out of every 10. I plan to use both the Micromesh and the Proteknet next year for the same types of plants.

Dawn, what about pollinators? Don't we need them to be able to penetrate? I've been thinking about getting some kind of netting, but I then thought about the parsley worm I saw on one of my parsley plants the other day. It will become a beautiful Swallowtail. I plant veggies for my family to eat and extra plants for the bees and butterflies. My veggie beds aren't large. Just 2 Square Foot Garden kits.