Garden On, Vashon

Silver and Kay White walk past their soft-fruit net-house. Note that the roof is tied back: it will be rolled out when the first fruit ripens.

Last week, I shared with you an e-rant from Sally Fox, last year’s president of the garden club. She complained that, while in years past she enjoyed a large harvest of raspberries, “This year, I have harvested FIVE.  Why?  The birds came and ate them ALL.  But why? For two years we shared nicely. This year it is very different. Clues?”

So I asked around and, turns out, everybody is having trouble saving their raspberries from birds. Finally, I called Bob Norton, one of the founders of the Vashon Fruit Club. “Yes, I’ve heard that complaint from everyone, and I have a theory: want to hear it?”

Of course… 

Bob’s explanation has to do with our cool spring. This time of year, fruit-eating birds such as robins, starlings, and cedar waxwings eat predominantly the fruit of Prunus avian or bird cherry, also known as the mazzard. This wild tree, says Norton, is the parent of our domestic eatable cherry and is still often used as a grafting stock for orchard cherries. These tall, slender trees bloom in March, lighting up our woodland margins in clouds of dainty, dingy white.

This year, says, Norton, our spring was so cool that the bees didn’t emerge until after the mazzards flowered. With no bees to reach the flowers, there’s no pollination: thus, none of those wild cherries that the birds prefer to eat. Though robins, for instance, are adapted to eat primarily cherries, they’re certainly put a peck into any soft fruit they can reach—like your strawberries, raspberries, or currants.

“The problem is probably worse this year because we had such good bird-raising conditions last year,” Bob conjectured. “The birds had a good hatch and probably more chicks survived to this year, so now there’s more competition for food. They’re even in my plums, these days.”

So if you’ve got berries, you’ve probably also got birds gobbling them down. 
What to do?

The only real solution is to tent your berries with bird-netting. For raspberries, it’s probably too late, said Bob, but he warned, “blueberries are next, so if you want to keep them for yourself, better net them now.”

Bird-netting—black webbing at 1″ intervals—is available at our local hardware stores. My friend Sandy, who has grown blueberries for decades, thinks that draping the bushes in tulle—the same fabric as ballerina tutus—works better. “I clothes-pin tulle net fabric over them when they’re loaded with berries.  You can buy ‘bird proof’ netting, but the mesh on it is large enough that the clumps of berries get tangled in it and it makes picking the bushes a hassle.” 

Yes, when branches grow through the netting, there’s no way to lift the netting without ripping off leaves—and berries. And birds can get tangled in the nets, too. I recently participated in a discussion on www.growveg.com about that predicament, one which “G” had that changed her ways.

“ I’ve always shared with the birds, ever since I found a live goldfinch tangled in the previous years’ bird netting.  I cut him out and carefully picked all that black, sticky netting from his wings. He sat rather stunned for awhile on my hand and then jumped on my shoulder, where he sat for several minutes.  It felt like he was saying, “Thank you.”  I haven’t had the heart to use the nasty stuff again.”

Another good, though large-scale solution is to build a berry-house. You may have seen Kay White’s berry enclosure during the VAA Garden Tour: it’s a big square enclosure built with 8′ tall poles and lightweight wooden beams between them, with bird-netting wrapped all around it to make both walls AND a roof. To avoid collecting leaves, Kay’s crew leaves the net-roof rolled back through most of the year, unrolling it over the berries before the shrubs set fruit. It’s a permanent solution that works best if you have many shrubs; maximize the protection by including strawberry beds and grapevines in it.

Ken Miller and Barb Adams on the north end also put a net-house around their berries. He says, “We call it a “room with a view,” looking at all those nice berries. We too can roll the top back.”

I’m not going to net this year because my blueberry bushes are new and in their first year are supposed to be pruned of fruit anyway. Whatever berries escaped my notice, the birds are welcome to. But not next year!