My wife Juana has always said that we need to share our crops with our animal and avian friends. I agree with her to a degree though I point out to her that the definition of the word share, a part of a whole, esp. a portion allotted or assigned to a member of a group, must be adhered to by all interested parties.
Unfortunately, few of the birds or beasts the inhabit the nearby woods know neither the Merriam-Webster definition of share nor pay heed to it. So over the past five years we have tried a variety of schemes to protect as much of our berry population from the larger vermin living nearby. (We have a different strategy for the smaller vermin of slugs and bugs that love strawberries and other low-growing fruits.)
These schemes have ranged from trying to drape bird netting over the bushes (making it hard to harvest) to building temporary structures with sticks and bamboo poles. This year, however, I believe I have taken the best of a couple of techniques to build a structure that is both sturdy and temporary so that when the berry season is over, I can easily remove my berry house and store it away until next year. It should also keep away the birds.
The Eureka moment came to me when I was pursuing a catalog from one of my many horticultural suppliers, Greenhouse Megastore. Flipping the pages, I found myself staring at connector fittings for PVC pipe that let up to five different pipes link to a common point. The more I stared at these fittings the more I thought they held the answer to my blueberry frame challenge.
I quickly saw that I could build a simple frame consisting of PVC pipes that would be strong and easy to assemble as well as disassemble. To attach the pipes to the ground, I purchased 2-foot lengths of steel rebar that I could pound into the ground and slip a pipe over.
The next challenge was to attach horizontal pipes to my cedar fence. Nothing from GM jumped out at me so I went to my local Home Depot to look at the different available fittings for PVC pipe. In the fittings section I found end caps that fit snuggly into the pipe. If I drilled a hole in the end of the pipe I could screw it into the fence with a sheet rock screw and attach a pipe to it.
It sounded like it would work. And the strangest thing about this project is that it did. Unlike many of my conceptual fixes around the house this scheme worked exactly as I imagined it would taking me less than 1 hour to put the whole thing together. An added bonus was that I had lots of PVC pipe clips that I used in the winter for hoop houses that could be used to attach bird screen to the pipe. And in an unusual way, that worked again too. (I discovered in a prior year that deer netting does not stop birds from fly though. Thus I need to net the deer netting of the fence with bird netting.)
After I finished the construction, I surveyed my berry cage, which looked as if it would protect our growing crop of berries. Though many were still green a few had started to blue up. It looked to be a berry good summer.
