Strawberry Patch Critters Update

On May 24, I wrote a blog post called Outsmart Robins in Your Strawberry Patch. Judging by the hundreds of views so far, we apparently aren’t the only ones with bird challenges! Now it’s time for an update.

As a quick refresher, robins love to peck at our tasty strawberries which is a frustrating problem. Bill decided to put some “fake cherries” in the patch as decoys to thwart those birds. Even though they’re not technically strawberries, he felt it was more the color that mattered. Spoiler alert: it turns out he was right!

He put many of the decoys throughout our oblong strawberry patch, shortly before we left on vacation. When we returned, we didn’t see any pecked strawberries, which is a sure sign of bird damage. Hooray!

However, we did spot a related problem. There were quite a few strawberries that had been nibbled (rather than pecked) and Bill deduced it was from mice. You might think, “how can you tell the difference?” But it’s a very different type of damage.

We live in a rural location where there are plenty of deer mice. Those are the creatures that carry hantavirus so it was important for us to nip that problem in the bud. We needed a practical solution. Bill put a couple of wind-up mouse traps at the edge of the strawberry patch. And he has caught deer mice in them every night.

The good news is that it’s now hard to find any nibbled berries. So we’re starting to get a decent harvest each morning.

At this point, we feel those cherry decoys have been keeping the robins out of our strawberry patch. And that was the whole point of this experiment. So if you’ve been considering doing something like this, here are a few pointers:

• It’s preferable to put the fake fruits in place early in the season, while the berries are still very green.
• Try to pick your strawberries each day as soon as some berries turn red, just to be on the safe side.
• If you want to use the fake cherries, do an Amazon search on “Fake Cherries Artificial Fruit Cake Decorations.” That should do the trick!
• Pick up the cherry decoys at the end of your strawberry season and store them out of the elements. That way, they’ll last for years.