6 Best Mesh Tarps For Insect Control That Work Without Sprays
Protect your outdoor space from insects without sprays. Our guide reviews the 6 best mesh tarps that provide an effective, chemical-free physical barrier.
You walk out to your garden, proud of those perfect rows of broccoli, only to find the leaves look like Swiss cheese. The culprit? Cabbage worms, again. Before you reach for a sprayer, take a step back and consider a different approach: building a fortress instead of fighting a war. Physical barriers like mesh tarps and row covers are a hobby farmer’s best tool for stopping pests before they even start, saving you time, money, and frustration.
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Physical Barriers: Your First Line of Defense
Think of a mesh tarp, often called a floating row cover, as a screen door for your garden. It lets in the good stuff—sunlight, air, and water—while keeping the bad stuff out. The core idea is simple: if a pest can’t physically land on a plant, it can’t eat it or lay its eggs on it. This is proactive gardening at its finest.
This strategy goes beyond just insects. A good cover can deter birds from pecking at your seedlings and rabbits from nibbling on your lettuce. Depending on the material’s weight, it can even offer a few degrees of frost protection on a cool spring night or reduce sun scorch on a blistering summer afternoon. It’s a multi-purpose tool that solves several problems at once.
The trade-off is the setup. You can’t just toss it on and walk away. It needs to be supported by hoops to keep it off the plants and secured tightly to the ground to prevent pests from crawling underneath. You also have to remove it for tasks like weeding or harvesting, which adds an extra step to your routine. But for crops notorious for pest damage, like squash or brassicas, that extra effort pays for itself.
Agfabric Floating Row Cover for Versatility
Protect plants from frost, snow, and pests with this 10'x50' plant cover. The UV-stabilized fabric allows air and moisture to reach plants, extending the growing season.
Agfabric is one of the most common and accessible brands you’ll find, and for good reason. It’s the reliable workhorse of row covers, offering a fantastic balance of performance and price. Its main strength lies in the variety of weights available, allowing you to choose the right tool for the specific job and season.
For example, their lightest fabric (around 0.55 oz/sq yd) is perfect for summer use. It provides excellent insect protection against pests like squash vine borers and cucumber beetles while allowing over 85% of sunlight to pass through, preventing your plants from overheating. A heavier weight (like 0.9 oz or 1.2 oz) is better suited for the shoulder seasons, giving you that same pest barrier plus a bit of insulation against a late spring frost.
While it’s called a "floating" cover, meaning it’s light enough to rest directly on sturdy plants, using hoops is almost always the better choice. Hoops create a tunnel that improves air circulation, prevents the fabric from abrading tender leaves in the wind, and makes it much easier to lift for access. Think of Agfabric as your general-purpose, go-to option for most common garden challenges.
Agribon AG-15 for Lightweight Pest Control
When your primary, and perhaps only, goal is insect control in the heat of summer, Agribon AG-15 is the specialist you call in. This is an ultra-lightweight, premium-grade row cover designed for maximum light and air transmission. It’s the closest you can get to an invisible forcefield for your plants.
The AG-15 allows about 90% of sunlight to penetrate, which is critical for sun-loving crops like beans, peppers, and eggplant. Its gossamer-thin material provides almost no heat retention, which is exactly what you want on a 90-degree day. It won’t cook your plants, but it will effectively block tiny menaces like flea beetles, leafhoppers, and aphids.
This is not the cover you choose for frost protection. It offers virtually none. But that’s its strength—it does one job and does it exceptionally well. If you’ve ever lost your entire potato or eggplant crop to a swarm of flea beetles, you understand the value of a barrier that can be left on all season long without compromising plant health.
Dalen Gardeneer Netting for Cabbage Moths
Sometimes, you don’t need to stop every single insect; you just need to stop one particularly destructive one. For anyone growing broccoli, cabbage, kale, or other brassicas, that enemy is the cabbage moth. Dalen’s Gardeneer Netting is the perfect targeted solution for this problem.
This product isn’t a fine fabric but a durable, woven plastic net with a mesh size of about 3/8 inch. This design has two major advantages. First, the large openings allow for unrestricted airflow and sunlight, which is great for plant health. Second, it’s tough enough to last for many seasons, unlike some finer fabrics that can tear after a year or two of use.
The key is that the mesh is just small enough to prevent the white cabbage moth from flying through to lay its eggs. It won’t stop smaller pests like aphids or flea beetles, so it’s not a universal solution. But if cabbage worms are your main foe, this netting is a highly effective, long-lasting, and low-maintenance way to protect your entire brassica patch.
Tierra Garden Haxnicks Micromesh for Tiny Pests
On the other end of the spectrum from wide-hole netting is micromesh. The Haxnicks Micromesh is engineered to be the ultimate defense against the smallest of garden pests. We’re talking about insects that can wiggle through standard row covers, like carrot rust flies, onion maggots, and thrips.
The weave on this material is incredibly fine—often less than 1mm. This creates a near-impenetrable barrier that stops even minuscule insects in their tracks. It’s the ideal choice when you’re growing a crop that is consistently devastated by a tiny, hard-to-see pest. For example, if you can never get a decent carrot harvest because of rust fly larvae, this is your answer.
The trade-off for this level of protection is reduced light and air circulation. While still breathable, it doesn’t allow as much airflow as a lighter cover like Agribon AG-15. You have to weigh the risk of the pest against the potential for slightly slower growth or heat buildup. For high-value or highly susceptible crops, that trade-off is often well worth it.
VIVOSUN Garden Netting for Large Bed Coverage
For the hobby farmer with more than just a few small beds, buying covers in small packages gets expensive and impractical fast. Brands like VIVOSUN cater to this need by offering large, bulk rolls of durable garden netting at a much better price per square foot. This is the choice for covering long rows or multiple large beds efficiently.
This type of netting is typically made from a tough, UV-stabilized polyethylene that feels more like a heavy-duty screen than a soft fabric. It’s designed to be cut to whatever size you need without unraveling, giving you complete flexibility to customize your setup. It provides an excellent barrier against common pests from cabbage moths to squash bugs while being tough enough to withstand wind and sun for several seasons.
The focus here is on scale and durability. It’s a practical investment that saves you from having to piece together smaller covers or replace flimsy ones every year. If you’re serious about using physical barriers across a significant portion of your garden, buying in bulk like this is the most economical and sustainable approach.
Gardman Grow Tunnel: An All-in-One Solution
Not everyone has the time or desire to bend their own hoops and custom-fit fabric. For those who value convenience and speed, an all-in-one grow tunnel is the perfect solution. The Gardman Grow Tunnel is a great example of this "garden-in-a-bag" concept.
These products come as a single, integrated unit with the support hoops and the mesh cover already attached. Setup is as simple as pulling the accordion-style tunnel to its full length, positioning it over your row of plants, and pushing the spiked ends of the hoops into the ground. You can go from box to fully protected row in under five minutes.
The downside is a lack of flexibility. You’re limited to the tunnel’s fixed width and length, and it’s almost always more expensive than buying the components separately. However, for protecting a single, standard-sized row of lettuce or carrots, the sheer ease of use is hard to beat. It’s an excellent entry point for anyone new to using covers or for the time-strapped gardener who needs a quick, reliable fix.
Securing Your Mesh Tarp Against Wind and Pests
A mesh tarp is only as good as its seal with the ground. Any gap, no matter how small, is an open invitation for pests to crawl under and bypass your defenses entirely. The wind is your other great enemy, as a flapping cover can shred itself and damage the plants beneath it.
The goal is to create a continuous, unbroken seal along every edge of the cover. While burying the edges with soil works, it’s a hassle to uncover for harvesting and can lead to premature tearing. Piling on rocks or bricks is better, but they can leave gaps and their sharp edges can easily rip the delicate fabric.
The best method is using sandbags. You can buy purpose-made anchor bags or simply use old feed sacks filled with sand, gravel, or soil. They are heavy, conform perfectly to uneven ground to create a tight seal, and are easy to lift and move without damaging the cover. Lay them end-to-end along the entire perimeter for a pest-proof, wind-proof fortress that will last the whole season.
Choosing to use a physical barrier is a shift in mindset from reacting to pest problems to preventing them from ever starting. It puts you in control, reducing the need for sprays and the stress of constant vigilance. By selecting the right cover for the right pest and securing it properly, you’re not just protecting a crop; you’re building a more resilient and predictable garden.
