Here’s a great gardening hack. Use this trick to make your bird netting glide off strawberry and raspberry plants!
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Here’s a great tip that I learned a few years back that will make your strawberry patch a much happier place for you to be!
Bird Netting Troubles
If your yard is anything like ours then the birds probably love hanging out in it.
I don’t mind having birds around except when they decide to eat my strawberries (or poop on my patio furniture)! And just about the time our spring strawberries start to ripen the robin’s show up for a snack! (The funny thing is that they only bother the patch in the spring, we hardly ever lose strawberries in the fall.)
Early on in our gardening life we didn’t plan for or defend against the robins and ended up losing most of one year’s crop before we caught on and got some bird netting
to protect our patch.
For a few years after that we just threw the bird netting over our patch and then fought with it every time we needed to pick berries. The berries and plants would get caught up in the net and things were still frustrating!
Why Do We have Bottles in Our Garden?
I learned this great gardening trick to make the bird netting glide. We put 2 1/2 foot wooden (preferably cedar) stakes all around our patch and then put glass pickles or tomato sauce bottles over the tops of the stakes.
The stakes keep the bird netting up off the strawberry plants and the glass bottles keep the netting from snagging on the stakes when we remove the bird netting for harvesting. The netting just glides right off!! We have even used this idea with taller stakes for raspberry plants.
Almost anyone who comes through my garden asks me about the bottles. And the next question they ask is, “don’t they break?” The answer is no.
We have been using this method for protecting our strawberries for 8 years now and in that time not one bottle has broken. Any that happens to fall off usually land in the soft garden soil without a problem. If you use a good solid stake and longer, slim bottles (think spaghetti sauce bottles) then they should hardly ever fall off!
Got any great “garden hacks” of your own? Leave us a comment or better yet send us an email and we will try it out and use it in a future post!! Email to admin@ourstoneyacres.com
I always use hoops for my bird netting over the strawberries. Of course my berries are just one plant wide so I don’t really have to take off the netting when I harvest. I just put my hand under to pick.
This is a great tip that I only heard about this year. Like you, we had issues with birds eating all the berries the 1st year. Then I just plopped the netting right on the plants the second year & it did get all tangled up in the leaves & some berries still poked out. Now I stick 2′ sections of rebar into the ground and use plastic cups that we got from the dollar store to hold up the netting – My strawberry plants will hopefully thank me with a nice harvest!
This makes such a big difference in getting to our strawberries!!
This is such a great idea! Thank you for sharing! I do have birds hanging out in my garden all the time and visiting our patio furniture too! They are nice to watch but not nice when they eat all my food!! I will definitely be trying this asap.
Sheila,
Try some rubber snakes near patio furniture or if a roost rafter they know them as predators and rather go elsewhere ! Farm raised brother in law uses in his pavillion gets no nesting.
This is a great idea… and one we will be using this year!!! We just moved our strawberries to a new bed w/ more sun and they are thriving… and I know the birds will notice! Now, I need to modify this for the blueberry bushes! 🙂
What a fantastic idea. I am going to print this. The birds ate all my berries and peaches!
Thank you for this great idea I was trying to find a way to keep the netting up off the strawberries
Better late than never — perfect, in fact! My raspberries thank you!
Thanks!
I’ve started some cuttings and made some divisions. To hold them at the rental duplex I’ve put up a temporary screen cover . The 2×2 uprights wear on the cover. Well thanks to you no more.
Just a temporary thing until we find the house.
Glad I can help. Amazing how some of the silliest ideas turn out to be so handy!
Just gave me an idea to protect my cucumbers! Thanks!
What a great idea. I actually built a frame with PVC pipe and connectors for my strawberries, but this looks like just the ticket for my blueberries. Nice and simple.
What a great tip to make life easier! I will definitely try this!