Protect Blueberries from Birds

I am so lucky to have a smart, creative husband! Bill just came up with an ingenious way to protect blueberries from nibbling birds. And it’s so cool, I wanted to share the idea with you.

A bit of background first…

We’ve grown high-bush blueberries for over 30 years. There are early, mid- and late season varieties in our little patch. These include Duke, Earliblue, Patriot and Spartan (early); Bluecrop, Bluejay and Collins (midseason); and Darrow (late).

Crop protection methods we’ve tried:

We learned early on that birds (esp. robins) love those berries just as much as we do. To keep them from stealing our berries, we first tried bird netting. Unfortunately, the berries got caught in the mesh. Whenever we needed to remove it to pick the fruits, they would get caught in it. As a result, berries went flying everywhere! That wasn’t a good option.

Then I got creative in about 2010. We bought some floating row cover and I stitched together 3 long, wide pieces. You can see it in the photo to the left. We’d gently place it over the blueberry bushes and hold it down with some bricks around the perimeter. That worked great! The only problem is that row cover only lasts for so long. After a few years, we had gaping holes which certainly reduced its effectiveness. We continued using it but it was such a pain in the neck to lift it off the plants. We’d do our picking and put it back on. And, of course, if the wind was blowing while we were picking berries, that complicated matters.

Bill’s ingenious solution

We both knew the time had come to replace the huge cover I’d made. But, to be honest, neither of us relished the idea of continuing with the row cover method. As it turns out, Bill had been mulling over potential solutions to protect blueberries. Here’s what he came up with:

He found a 10’x10′ pop-up canopy frame on Amazon. It is lightweight yet durable. He also found mosquito netting for the side walls of this size canopy. This set-up is almost 7′ tall which means we can stand up and easily move around while picking berries. To cover the top, Bill used a large piece of 1″ mesh bird netting instead of the provided cover. He’s had that netting for years to keep birds out of our cherry trees. Now that we don’t grow cherries anymore, it was nice to put it to good use.

You can click on the photo at the top of this post to see more of the details. However, I’ve also got a close-up of the set-up here. The odd thing is that the canopy frame isn’t currently available but I’m certain there are similar models available. It was pretty easy to assemble everything.

There’s one more important point I want to share! I mentioned earlier that we have early, mid and late season varieties. This 10×10 canopy fits over all of the early and mid-season varieties, which will ripen first. We needed to cover that section of the blueberry bed first, once bees had pollinated all of the flowers. Bill intends to cover the late season varieties once those flowers have been pollinated and are closer to ripening. He will either use mosquito netting, floating row cover or agricultural insect netting.

I’ll definitely do an update on how all of this works. But I love how we’ll be able to stand or sit while picking. I also love how we can easily take it down after blueberry season and store it till next year.

If you’d like to learn how to grow blueberries, here’s one of my garden columns on the topic.