"Hold This", or The Joys Of Installing Bird Netting

Fort Blueberry

Don't get me wrong, we love birds of all shapes and sizes, except maybe crows, but we love our blueberries even more.

As we've watched the current crop of blueberries ripening, it has become apparent that we need to protect the berries from attack from the air as well as from assault by ground forces in the form of the California Ground Squirrels who will soon emerge from their burrows with their cute but voracious babies, looking for a juicy meal or three.

The California Towhees have been eyeing the blueberry crop as it ripens, so that meant it was time to install the bird netting over the raised bed.

Cindy first slipped some PVC pipe on top of the panel stakes, then cut lengths of black irrigation tubing and slid it into the PVC pipe to form a half hoop from one side of the bed to another.  That created a structure to support the bird netting, but the real trick was getting the dang netting over the bed and clipping it the the upper edges of the protective panels.

That's where I, as the unskilled labor of choice, came in, for "hold this" while we stretched the netting from side to side.  We finally got it all stretched and clipped, although for a while I thought Cindy was going to become a big cocoon of netting as she clipped the last two pieces of it together.

Then she attached strips of mylar to the hoops to warn the birds off.  That worked for about half a day; we later saw a Mourning Dove sitting on top of one of the hoops, ignoring the mylar, but fortunately the dove flew away without becoming entangled in the netting.

And, of course, we just had to pick some of the riper blueberries while we were there.  Yum.