Outsmart Robins in Your Strawberry Patch

Isn’t it annoying when birds eat things we’re growing for ourselves? Would you like to know how to outsmart robins so they don’t eat your strawberries? Well, we can all thank my husband Bill for this ingenious idea!

He never ceases to amaze me because he comes up with interesting ways to solve garden problems. We’ve been watching our strawberry plants closely this spring. They’re blooming like crazy and we know the berries will soon start developing. I think you’ll agree that one of life’s greatest pleasures is eating fully-ripened, sweet strawberries from your own garden. Am I right?

Unfortunately, American robins love strawberries just as much as we do. If we didn’t take action, we’d lose out on the majority of them. And it’s pretty difficult to lay a cover over the plants because they’re growing in our blueberry patch. The bees are still pollinating those flowers so we don’t dare cover the whole bed yet.

We used to grow cherry trees in our small orchard, both sweet and pie cherries. But the annoying thing is that the robins always got to the cherries first because they new the exact moment they were ripe. Argh!

A few years ago, Bill bought some fake cherries from Amazon. (see photo below) They were primarily designed to be used for cake decorations. He strung some on monofilament line and draped them throughout each tree. He figured that after a few times of pecking on something hard, they’d give up. And they generally did. (oh, it’s so much fun to fool those robins!)

You’ll recall how folks have painted rocks red to make them appear like strawberries, right? Well, this is the same concept. You might be wondering why Bill didn’t look online for fake strawberries. He wanted to be thrifty and try to repurpose the fake cherries. Nothing wrong with that!

How Bill hopes to outsmart the robins this time:

Fast-forward to today: Bill decided he could try the same tactic in our strawberry patch. He removed the fake cherries from long pieces of monofilament and instead strung 2-4 cherries on short lines. Then Bill hid them within several of our strawberry plants.

Even though the cherries don’t entirely look like strawberries, it just might work! As you can see by the photo above, it’s got potential. Now we’re anxious awaiting berry-harvesting season to see who won: the robins or Bill?

Stay tuned for an update. More than anything, I wanted to pass along the notion that you CAN fool Mother Nature from time to time! Fingers crossed.