Last year the birds pecked the heck out of my berries, so this year I have netting on my thornless blackberries. How much of a struggle is this going to be? It was a pain to get it unrolled and into position, and now I wonder how often I need to check it for entangled birds and critters? It is 0.8 inch black square mesh.
Thanks
"Dave" wrote in news:1121361391.758428.210080 @o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com:
My mother always covered her strawberries with a net. She'd anchor the netting with gallon water jugs, which made pulling the netting off and putting it back on quite easy. She also used a fine mesh (like a window screen) rather than something as large as you're describing.
I'm not sure how big blackberry plants get, but I hope this gives you a few ideas to make things easier.
Puckdropper
I always just used bricks.
Fine mesh would be nice. Plants parts wouldn't poke through and get tangled and it would be much easier to free trapped birds. With the larger mesh I used, they seemed to always manage to get their head and one wing through the hole. Sometimes I couldn't free them without snipping at least one strand to enlarge the hole.
Steve
The past several years I've been covering by strawberry bed with a double layer of cotton toole. I buy the toole by the bolt in the fall (after the wedding season when it's half-price) at a fabric store. It keeps the birds out and limits the damage from squirrels.
The bed has a border made from pine logs cut from my woodlot. The toole is tacked down along one side with lathe and anchored on the other side with oak or maple poles.
Surely the neighbourhood cats will do all necessary untangling?
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