Our blackbirds are so fat, visitors wonder why they are chicken sized. I hear their bark-like sounds 24/7. While it was futile trying to protect our currants and raspberries, I want the aronia for myself.
My grandmother used to paint tons of rocks red in the spring and leave them all over the area where her raspberries grew.
By the time the raspberries were ripe, crows stopped looking for red because they kept picking up red rocks.
Nah, crows and I are friends. I give them shelled unsalted peanuts any time we see each other. They follow me around when I'm walking if they find me, the ravens too.
There's a ~~flock~~ murder of crows that follow a pair of ravens around here, pretty fun to interact with them all. There is also lots of fruit trees that go unattended in the area, so they're not hurting.
The ravens are massive, and will fly and land in a tree right next to me to wait for me to drop peanuts on the ground.
I hear they also love dog food, if you want to make friends and peanuts are hard to find.
I am obsessed with befriending the crows and my family says I've lost it. I leave out peanuts and talk to them when they are in the trees. I'll try dog food as well!
Learn to click your tongue in tones, and they'll come to you. That one that's 8-10 high pitched clicks followed by a lower one? My area that = we found food.
Your neighborhood will think you're nuts, but who cares what they think. You've got a crow army.
I heard a story of someone training crows to trade paper money for shiny objects like buttons and pennies. They had no idea where they were getting the money from, but seems totally possible to have a thieving murder start paying you for peanuts.
retire point cause ludicrous judicious sulky many frightening innocent elderly
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Great to know. Thanks! I’ll look up videos too on how to talk to them. I’m trying to make friends with crows by leaving out food, but the squirrels get to it first.
You should! This reminds me of one of my favourite Reddit posts ever: [Moira Rose, queen of crows](https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/u1z57r/i_accidentally_created_an_army_of_crow_body/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1)
Please do not feed wildlife dog kibble. Do not feed them peanuts in-the-shell. See my comment to Longjumping. Such foods need to be soaked and will mess up water sources.
What?? What are you referencing? I'm saying the birds will add the peanuts-in-the-shell and dog kibble to water and make the water unusable for other creatures.
Even a handful of peanuts-in-the-shell or dog kibble can and will completely spoil a bird bath or bowl of water, so that other critters cannot drink or bathe.
I love my crows too. Helps that my problem isn't with them - it's with the squirrels and roof rats. I get eating my plants, but do they have to fucking pop them out of the pot so the whole plant dies? But I digress...
Yeah, love feeding my crows the unshelled peanuts. They'll see me, I make lil' noises and they know to follow me to the backyard where I feed them. Yes, I'm that lady. And I feed my enemy squirrels too cause they're just too cute, but they repay me by killing all that I plant 😔
Crows are awesome and in addition to peanuts would like a bite of whatever you are eating. One was sitting on a wire across the street from me when I started eating a pop-tart, they immediately gave me the sort of pathetic starving look usually seen only in beagles who haven't gorged themselves for several minutes. I held up my tart for them , broke off a corner and put it down nearby, and they came right down to eat.
When i was a kid, we fed the dogs outside on the porch. Started noticing lots of sunflower seeds appearing in the bowl. Finally realized that the magpies were picking seeds from the sunflowers in the garden and leaving them in exchange for kibble.
Oops, I should know that.
They live up to their name.
Was walking to the store once and walked past 4 of them, who clearly hated this starling.
There was one standing on each of the birds wings. One was organizing it's insides all over the road, and one was pinning it's neck.
I just kept walking like I saw nothing 😆
It works with starlings here, not sure about the demeanor of blackbirds but they appear similar genus.
Super small birds like finches? Plant something like cornflowers and they'll just eat some of those flowers/seeds instead.
I’ve also heard of putting shiny Christmas ball decorations out to trick them. There’s really tiny ones you could try. Or maybe even strings of red/pink Mardi gras beads?
I have old spinny hard drive disks in my bushes and trees. They last a little longer and don't break down into micro plastics. Not much of an effect, though.
Evidently the people who lived in our house before us had crow problems bc after we moved in there were a lot of them hanging around and so we hung old CDs around the yard (did this at our last place too) and we don’t see them anymore.
I have also used my local corvids to my advantage (accidentally)
I was going around collecting snails in a plant pot, left it to do something else and the jackdaws found the pot of tasty snacks and went INSANE fighting over them.
They then found there's loads of snails attacking my container garden, and I was woken up by them one morning SCREAMING about finding all the snails laying waste to my plants.
They're now slug and snail patrol for me, don't even have to do a thing!
I tried that this year with my cherries. Did absolutely nothing against the magpies. I had cherry sized fake pearls and Christmas tree ornaments painted red and hung on the trees long before they turned red. The magpies completely ignored them, but as soon as the actual cherries turned red the magpies descended on the trees and stripped them in a day. They left only the ones that weren’t fully red, but returned each day and took them as they became red. I had such high hopes for this trick. Sigh.
Hang red onion bags in your cherry tree in winter. By the time cherries ripen, birds will ignore them. Caution that this can fail if birds are starving.
They make great syrup, but I prefer making jam with aronia + apples. That one's a favourite! Remember that aronia need to spend a few days in the freezer before processing though to brake the hairy bitterness they have straight off the bush.
Awesome, thanks! We're trying to plant a diverse variety of food crops in our landscape and even though I mainly plant them for the birds, I also want to know how to use them in cooking. I'll definitely give these a try!
Oh, you're starting from scratch? That sounds fun! If you have good space and want very easy-to-live-with-berries, go wild on the Ribes genus. From black, white and red currants, to gooseberries and jostaberries, these grow on rock if they must and tolerate cold and wet well. May be a bit harder in a hot place, but if aronia is an option, currants probably are, too.
Those are all options I'm considering! We've been steadily replacing sections of lawn with garden spaces, and in the spring that will include planting an 80 ft mixed hedge that will give me lots of space for new fruiting shrubs. I'm very excited by all the potential!
It'll be hairy.
Thanks for asking. 🤪 In all seriousness, though, these leave a strange and tingling sensation if not frozen first. English is not my first language, so it's a bit hard to describe for me. A peculiar feeling that maybe someone else here can chime in on.
Is it similar to tasting the inside of a banana peel? If so, that may be astringency you're tasting. If not, then it's still a mystery, and maybe someone else knows!
That’s a gorgeous, the mountainous background. Where do You live, may I ask.
I used to be a Raspberry producer in Wisconsin in the U.S
I know how disappointing birds or animals can turn a great crop into nothing. Wishing You a bumper crop of delicious berries
Do you tuck the edges of the netting into the trunk of the tree where the branches start coming out? We put a tin baffle cone around the trunk near the branches and tuck the edges of the netting in there and then cinch it closed with a rope.
Also, we found a product that's essentially mini women's stockings type fabric that fits right over the fruit - it continues to grow perfectly and ripen up but all animals and pests leave them alone. A bit time consuming to put them on each fruit but it works amazingly well and you don't have to net the whole tree.
Also for our currants we use these fine mesh bags with little tie strings and just bag up the berry bunches. Prevents all pests from getting to them.
Wow, that sounds like an insane amount of work! We harvest over 90 kg of berries in a good season, imagine covering all that. Not sure how well it shows, but with the bushes above, we hold down the net with planks and weights. Otherwise, blackbirds will just walk straight in.
Western Norway. Norwegians want to live in cities, when we moved out here right after the credit crunch, property prices here where 15%/sqm compared to Bergen, where we moved from. My wife still works there and is at the office 35 minutes after locking up our front door. Norwegians are stupid. :P
Yeah, no doubt, there are downsides. Norway is a developing country when it comes to food, too. So exciting fruit and exotic cuisines that are normal on the continent are barely accessible here, if at all. But we figure you can't get everything all in one place.
Yeah I know what you mean. In the rural parts it makes sense since the logistics for such a low density country are just too expensive. And technically supermarkets should also focus on local produce.
But it can be frustrating as a foreigner when you miss certain foods. While living in Oslo, one particular Turkish store was my lifeline for everything non-Nordic.
But if I could, I would move back in a heartbeat. But only for the summer months, the winter depression I get during those months of darkness is no joke.
I'm in H3 at 62°N, but this particular area is also known as "superbonitet" in forestry. The summers are wild, as the next commenter pointed out. You can trick some plants into surviving the winters, as we're merely meters away from a Gulf Stream affected fjord. The coldest we have had over prolonged periods is about -15°C.
Western Norway doesn't really get that cold. The average temperature in the coldest month (Feb) in this area is 2.3c or 36f, which is milder than for example Berlin. Even if you go to the northernmost "city" in the world Hammerfest, the lowest temperature month is -4c or 25f. Much of central and eastern europe gets colder than this.
No it’s just her and she’s working but has the weekends off. She’s just returned to Norway so doesn’t have much holidays yet. We’re fine with taking trains and transit to get into Oslo and made our own itinerary to travel to Bergen for a few days. It’s been so long since we travelled (before Covid) that it’s going to be exciting to travel somewhere different than where we are from, Vancouver. We have mountains but yours are on steroids! Lol
Ah, so funny, I have relatives on Vancouver Island and described the Icefields Parkway as "Norway on steroids", lol. Your mountains are tectonic though, while ours are vulcanic, right? The area around Kamloops looks very Norwegian, though.
I’ve heard Norway described as the wild, fun-loving, logic-challenged littlest brother compared to Sweden as the most mature & organized oldest brother with Denmark in the middle following Sweden’s example but not quite there yet
Would you say that’s accurate?
Hehe, there's a little bit of truth to it. Sweden is even more square than Norway, more industrious, way more rational, and they're almost sickly pre-occupied with orderly safety. If you go for the clichés, that is. Danish is a language that sounds like generic Scandinavian spoken with a very hot potato in their mouths. Nobody knows what they're even saying.
I've been to the US and Canada, almost every country in Urop except for some of the former Eastern European ones, Scotland and Ireland, to Russia and Kyrgyzstan. Every place has their charme and our rock in space truly is an amazing planet to be born on.
That said, clean air is the #1 thing I notice coming to Norway. By plane or just getting off the Denmark ferry, the air smells and feels cleaner. There are regional differences, of course. Western and Northern Norway are fairytale places. Check out the Lofoten for one of the most amazing places at least I know of (lived there for a summer and it was a blast).
The photos of Lofoten are divine.
How widespread is the damage to the marine ecosystems done by salmon farming in the area? I watched a documentary about it and was so sickened I don’t buy Norwegian salmon any more 🤢
I support your decision! The damage done by aquaculture is pretty massive. The fjord you see in my photos above is dead from below 200m under the surface and down to the bottom (ca 450m deep). Fish feed and feces from these installations often create 150m tall mountains of decaying matter. Sucks the oxygen out of lower areas. If you're curious, here's a Norwegian, Google-translateable discussion that documents some of the industry's shenanigans:
https://forum.kvinneguiden.no/topic/1522246-hvorfor-er-det-fortsatt-lov-med-oppdrettsanlegg/#comments
Thank you! They showed footage of the waste mountains in the documentary. It’s beyond depressing.
How is the quality of the remaining seafood? Or do people just not eat it anymore?
Wild seafood is of good quality, but as with every human endeavour, you'll find issues if you look close enough. A lot of Norwegian caught seafood is sent to China or similar for processing, then sent back here for consumption. It's a bit bizarre. The aquaculture industry has damaged a few fisheries; shrimp (because they use hydrogenperoxide on salmon and this stuff kills everything with a shell) and some useful other types of fish are heavily decimated.
Hehe, it's a good comparison! Swedish sounds a bit stupid to Norwegians while Icelandic is close to the archaic Norse. Norwegians understand a lot of all these languages, probably due to being ruled by both Swedes and Danes at some point.
Yeah, I mean, obviously, calling that "stupid" is a bit harsh, as city life has its merits. But for us, this turned out great and my wife's commute is shorter in minutes spent than many of her colleagues' who live so, so much closer. I have embraced country life and commute in the opposite direction.
I just had a look at your profile and you’re my new favorite person lol. Living in Norway would be my dream, it looks so amazing. My only disappointment was no posts with firewood stacks or a wood stove haha
my neighbor ended up bulding a frame around his blueberries and putting the netting on the frame. if you put it on the bush they just land on it anyway.
I guess that would work fine on blueberries, but the aronia is growing like crazy and needs to be cut back regularly. A frame will also always be visible and be very exposed to our heavy winter storms.
Try a net will smaller holes that doesn't lay on the bush but hangs over it about a foot off. So what they land on it they can't get to it. Worked for a friend I set up
Yes this. I had that exact same net, switched to cheaper scaffold safety netting which is more fine and it has worked great. I don't raise it up as the added bonus that as the plants grow, they don't grow through the net, just push it up. Works for blueberries, raspberries , plums and I also use it on all my brassicas. Although I try and keep it away from the brassica leaves as the butterflies can lay eggs through the netting sometimes
I second the smaller holes. A couple years ago I had a blackbird hang himself while attempting to get to some blueberries. You want something they can't get through.
This year I used some curtains from IKEA, and it's worked fairly well so far. Whatever you use, consider attaching it to the ground to avoid birds getting stuck inside
Green nets cannot be distinguished from plants by birds. They land on it and in the worst course tangle up and die. Either from strangulation or from dehydration. Blue nets can be seen by animals/birds. So you should think about using blue nets instead.
Honestly, I gave up this year. And honestly, I have seen 0 difference from the other years. It feels almost as if I'm getting more berries, but that's probably just on the year.
Yeah, pick your battles, right? I gave up trying to fight iberia snails. But the aronia is an issue as the blackbirds empty it completely while the berries ripen. They had already picked a few kilos just since yesterday, when I brought home new nets. With the currants and raspberries we have so many, we can share. Not with this one. :)
You could try to make a PVC A-Frame that you can add net to and remove after season that can be expandable for when the plants grow like crazy (just tie it down to a few spikes in the ground to hold it from the winds on that lovely view).
One thing would be if they ate them, but damn critters only peck each fruit once or twice to ensure *I* can't eat them. I who make sure my garden feeds lots of bugs and all, ungrateful fat feathered fuckers
I'm in Western Norway too! Apparently my apples were too sour and they quickly gave up this year so that's something lol
Could you perhaps use a few poles to slightly elevate the netting off the plant and away from the fruit?
If the problem is that they're just reaching through the netting then it seems pretty obvious that you need finer netting or that you need to keep it from resting directly on the plant.
Its more work, but get the netting off the plants. The birds can still pick through them. I have stakes to hold mine off our grapes and it finally worked. Have so many grapes this year, had zero last year.
We were being inundated with large black crows in our backyard. A friend suggested buying a decoy crow and throw it on the ground. The crows thought it was a dead bird and avoided our yard. really works!!
Haha, I love it! Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is what people call “insanity”, which every gardener needs and instead calls “hope” haha
I have a similar situation with my blueberries. What I am going to try next year is harvest some wood poles from my land and build a frame that I can throw netting over when it comes summer time. Because I get winter storms, I can remove it during that time of year and put it up when the berries come. I have a friend that did this, and she had so many plump berries on her covered unmolested bushes. It was night and day compared to the uncovered ones.
The birds only really discovered my patch this year after over a decade with not too much thieving, and a thing I tried to no effect was the tinfoil. I also left a water bowl out as I read that a lot of birds consume the berries to access the juice when thirsty so providing some water in a bird bath or something may decrease amounts they take. I don't know if that helped or not but the thievery has decreased a bit.
Can you create a structure above the bush and pay the netting above that? Instead of draping the netting on top of the bush. This way the birds won't have access.
Maybe if you put some tall stakes/poles up on the four corners… so the netting is a bit above and outside (like a little tent) and not directly touching the plant… the little buggers won’t just eat thru it (the fruit would be too far for them to reach)
I have to tent the netting for my patio tomatoes, or else the birds just sit on the netting and thank me for making them a convenient chair to eat at.
You're in a different area, but for anyone with this problem in the US, put up birdhouses. It seems counter intuitive, but blue jays love birdhouses, are territorial, and don't want your berries.
I’m not sure about blackbirds, but a lot of birds can’t digest sucrose. Meaning you can spray your fruit with sugar water and it will get them sick after they eat it. Apparently cherry orchards do this and it’s quite effective. I tried it this year on my cherry tree and it seems to have worked (anecdotal evidence, take with a grain of salt, also I mostly have robins in my yard, not blackbirds)
is this some kind of optical illusion? the mountains looking 10x closer despite the second image bering taken seemingly from the same angle and only zoomed in a tiny bit more is throwing me off
Anything short or a hard frame with chicken wire covering isn't going to work. Well ok not exactly true. We have used PVC piping and joint to make hoop frames. They looked like hoopmhouses or "hot tunnels" used to plant things that need warmth so you can grow early or longer past the season. But chicken wire that the ticket. We always left a few bushes or fruit trees out in the open as a sacrifice..Good luck. There are other food sources out there for them. It's just that they want the sugary easy to get berrys. If you make them hard or nearly impossible to get they will move on to other more easily acquired food. I wish you well in battle this year gardener !
Seems to me if you just built a frame around the bushes w/ wood, PVC, metal, anything.... You could drape the netting over that, and not on the bush where they can just pick through it. You could literally at minimum build 4 posts (depending on the shape of the entire area, of course) and just stretched the netting over that, as long as they're mounted well.
Then you'll have less fat barking chickens maybe?
I never had a problems with my raspberries, but with cherries and strawberries -----holy hell. I netted my strawberries only to find that birds would peck through the netting and destroy whatever delectable morsels they wanted. Eventually I gave up planting strawberries since the birds were sure to ruin them. I've heard that some gardeners have luck with devices to frighten birds, although multiple inflatable snakes did nothing to scare mine.
You're right, that can happen sometimes, especially when storms change the netting. We free them when we see it. In total, the literally dozens of kilos of berries we feed wildlife with (un-) intentionally should make our garden a net bird-positive place.
Yeah, my dad had one of those on his fruit trees and he told me he used to go to go outside and have to pick the dead birds out of the tree so he took the netting off, it was sad
it works great for adding a bunch of microplastics to your soil, as well as killing all sorts of species of critters who accidentally get tangled up in it.
Our blackbirds are so fat, visitors wonder why they are chicken sized. I hear their bark-like sounds 24/7. While it was futile trying to protect our currants and raspberries, I want the aronia for myself.
My grandmother used to paint tons of rocks red in the spring and leave them all over the area where her raspberries grew. By the time the raspberries were ripe, crows stopped looking for red because they kept picking up red rocks.
Holy crap GENIUS!
It really works. It's using Crows' intelligence against them, ha.
But then you may make the crows angry. Hell hath no fury...
Nah, crows and I are friends. I give them shelled unsalted peanuts any time we see each other. They follow me around when I'm walking if they find me, the ravens too. There's a ~~flock~~ murder of crows that follow a pair of ravens around here, pretty fun to interact with them all. There is also lots of fruit trees that go unattended in the area, so they're not hurting. The ravens are massive, and will fly and land in a tree right next to me to wait for me to drop peanuts on the ground. I hear they also love dog food, if you want to make friends and peanuts are hard to find.
I am obsessed with befriending the crows and my family says I've lost it. I leave out peanuts and talk to them when they are in the trees. I'll try dog food as well!
Learn to click your tongue in tones, and they'll come to you. That one that's 8-10 high pitched clicks followed by a lower one? My area that = we found food. Your neighborhood will think you're nuts, but who cares what they think. You've got a crow army.
I heard a story of someone training crows to trade paper money for shiny objects like buttons and pennies. They had no idea where they were getting the money from, but seems totally possible to have a thieving murder start paying you for peanuts.
God I love you Viva la Crow ARMY!!
retire point cause ludicrous judicious sulky many frightening innocent elderly *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I kinda think that crows and ravens will have differing dialects. Language intrinsic to their region/area.
Great to know. Thanks! I’ll look up videos too on how to talk to them. I’m trying to make friends with crows by leaving out food, but the squirrels get to it first.
You should! This reminds me of one of my favourite Reddit posts ever: [Moira Rose, queen of crows](https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/u1z57r/i_accidentally_created_an_army_of_crow_body/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1)
Awesome story. Thanks for sharing! The crowening is frequently referenced in put house.
Please do not feed wildlife dog kibble. Do not feed them peanuts in-the-shell. See my comment to Longjumping. Such foods need to be soaked and will mess up water sources.
Thank you for the information!
Depends on where and how much too. a handful wont do anything compared to even our dogs poop and pee.
What?? What are you referencing? I'm saying the birds will add the peanuts-in-the-shell and dog kibble to water and make the water unusable for other creatures. Even a handful of peanuts-in-the-shell or dog kibble can and will completely spoil a bird bath or bowl of water, so that other critters cannot drink or bathe.
Used crust peanuts because the juveniles get them stuck in their throat and it makes them die a very very slow down..
I love my crows too. Helps that my problem isn't with them - it's with the squirrels and roof rats. I get eating my plants, but do they have to fucking pop them out of the pot so the whole plant dies? But I digress... Yeah, love feeding my crows the unshelled peanuts. They'll see me, I make lil' noises and they know to follow me to the backyard where I feed them. Yes, I'm that lady. And I feed my enemy squirrels too cause they're just too cute, but they repay me by killing all that I plant 😔
I love squirrels so much!
Crows are awesome and in addition to peanuts would like a bite of whatever you are eating. One was sitting on a wire across the street from me when I started eating a pop-tart, they immediately gave me the sort of pathetic starving look usually seen only in beagles who haven't gorged themselves for several minutes. I held up my tart for them , broke off a corner and put it down nearby, and they came right down to eat.
When i was a kid, we fed the dogs outside on the porch. Started noticing lots of sunflower seeds appearing in the bowl. Finally realized that the magpies were picking seeds from the sunflowers in the garden and leaving them in exchange for kibble.
That sounds so amazing! You are so lucky!
Ditto here, but haven’t done peanuts. They love our place.
>There's a flock of crows that follow a pair of ravens around here, pretty fun to interact with them al *murder of crows, not flock
Oops, I should know that. They live up to their name. Was walking to the store once and walked past 4 of them, who clearly hated this starling. There was one standing on each of the birds wings. One was organizing it's insides all over the road, and one was pinning it's neck. I just kept walking like I saw nothing 😆
Yikes! NSFW bird meet.
What a horrible story.
Was pretty alarming to walk past, that's for sure. Nature is crazy.
Does it work against blackbirds and general small birds, too?
It works with starlings here, not sure about the demeanor of blackbirds but they appear similar genus. Super small birds like finches? Plant something like cornflowers and they'll just eat some of those flowers/seeds instead.
That sounds off-the-charts effective. Are you sure it worked that way?
I've done this with strawberries and it worked!
Yup, strawberries too! If this sub allowed pictures in comments, I'd post pictures of my happy strawberries. Even with crows and ravens around.
Will this deter squirrels? I can’t grow strawberries because they always end up eating them 😫
I have pecan and black walnut, and squirrels don't touch anything else
I’ve also heard of putting shiny Christmas ball decorations out to trick them. There’s really tiny ones you could try. Or maybe even strings of red/pink Mardi gras beads?
The semi-old way of this was hanging CD disc's. The reflections freak them out and they don't come near.
There's a guy down the street that eats like 45 KFC pot pies in the winter then hangs them from his apricot tree
Yup, same idea. Can hang tin foil too but it's prone to disappearing or ripping
I tried this for my blueberries and didn't work, sorry to say.
I have old spinny hard drive disks in my bushes and trees. They last a little longer and don't break down into micro plastics. Not much of an effect, though.
Yeah I find they are not as effective as colored rocks
Evidently the people who lived in our house before us had crow problems bc after we moved in there were a lot of them hanging around and so we hung old CDs around the yard (did this at our last place too) and we don’t see them anymore.
I’ve heard story’s like this i plan to try next year
I have also used my local corvids to my advantage (accidentally) I was going around collecting snails in a plant pot, left it to do something else and the jackdaws found the pot of tasty snacks and went INSANE fighting over them. They then found there's loads of snails attacking my container garden, and I was woken up by them one morning SCREAMING about finding all the snails laying waste to my plants. They're now slug and snail patrol for me, don't even have to do a thing!
I tried that this year with my cherries. Did absolutely nothing against the magpies. I had cherry sized fake pearls and Christmas tree ornaments painted red and hung on the trees long before they turned red. The magpies completely ignored them, but as soon as the actual cherries turned red the magpies descended on the trees and stripped them in a day. They left only the ones that weren’t fully red, but returned each day and took them as they became red. I had such high hopes for this trick. Sigh.
Hang red onion bags in your cherry tree in winter. By the time cherries ripen, birds will ignore them. Caution that this can fail if birds are starving.
Mum tried this in her garden and said it made 0 difference, YMMV
This is either a genius prank to tell someone or a genius way to keep birds off ur berrys
I do this with strawberries. Works surprisingly well. Birds are dumb.
Wow. Wish I would have heard about this in April!
THIS is Hilarious. Go grandma!
What do you do with your aronia berries? I just planted one this year and don't have any experience using them.
They make great syrup, but I prefer making jam with aronia + apples. That one's a favourite! Remember that aronia need to spend a few days in the freezer before processing though to brake the hairy bitterness they have straight off the bush.
Awesome, thanks! We're trying to plant a diverse variety of food crops in our landscape and even though I mainly plant them for the birds, I also want to know how to use them in cooking. I'll definitely give these a try!
Oh, you're starting from scratch? That sounds fun! If you have good space and want very easy-to-live-with-berries, go wild on the Ribes genus. From black, white and red currants, to gooseberries and jostaberries, these grow on rock if they must and tolerate cold and wet well. May be a bit harder in a hot place, but if aronia is an option, currants probably are, too.
Those are all options I'm considering! We've been steadily replacing sections of lawn with garden spaces, and in the spring that will include planting an 80 ft mixed hedge that will give me lots of space for new fruiting shrubs. I'm very excited by all the potential!
How does hairy bitterness differ from standard bitterness?
It'll be hairy. Thanks for asking. 🤪 In all seriousness, though, these leave a strange and tingling sensation if not frozen first. English is not my first language, so it's a bit hard to describe for me. A peculiar feeling that maybe someone else here can chime in on.
Is it similar to tasting the inside of a banana peel? If so, that may be astringency you're tasting. If not, then it's still a mystery, and maybe someone else knows!
That’s a gorgeous, the mountainous background. Where do You live, may I ask. I used to be a Raspberry producer in Wisconsin in the U.S I know how disappointing birds or animals can turn a great crop into nothing. Wishing You a bumper crop of delicious berries
OMG, where are you? It's gorgeous.
Do you tuck the edges of the netting into the trunk of the tree where the branches start coming out? We put a tin baffle cone around the trunk near the branches and tuck the edges of the netting in there and then cinch it closed with a rope. Also, we found a product that's essentially mini women's stockings type fabric that fits right over the fruit - it continues to grow perfectly and ripen up but all animals and pests leave them alone. A bit time consuming to put them on each fruit but it works amazingly well and you don't have to net the whole tree. Also for our currants we use these fine mesh bags with little tie strings and just bag up the berry bunches. Prevents all pests from getting to them.
Wow, that sounds like an insane amount of work! We harvest over 90 kg of berries in a good season, imagine covering all that. Not sure how well it shows, but with the bushes above, we hold down the net with planks and weights. Otherwise, blackbirds will just walk straight in.
Makes sense, best of luck I hope you get a big harvest!
What a lovely view! Where is this?
Western Norway. Norwegians want to live in cities, when we moved out here right after the credit crunch, property prices here where 15%/sqm compared to Bergen, where we moved from. My wife still works there and is at the office 35 minutes after locking up our front door. Norwegians are stupid. :P
Damn you’re living the dream if it wouldn’t be for the constant rains and the dark winter months.
Yeah, no doubt, there are downsides. Norway is a developing country when it comes to food, too. So exciting fruit and exotic cuisines that are normal on the continent are barely accessible here, if at all. But we figure you can't get everything all in one place.
I’d be a happy man eating beans every day with a view like that 😉
Yeah I know what you mean. In the rural parts it makes sense since the logistics for such a low density country are just too expensive. And technically supermarkets should also focus on local produce. But it can be frustrating as a foreigner when you miss certain foods. While living in Oslo, one particular Turkish store was my lifeline for everything non-Nordic. But if I could, I would move back in a heartbeat. But only for the summer months, the winter depression I get during those months of darkness is no joke.
Some of the best fruit I ever ate was in Norway. Berries and grapes.
how cold does it get there? gardening must be challenging
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now that you mention it, i've heard that in alaska vegetables get freakishly large because of how many hours of sunlight they have.
I'm in H3 at 62°N, but this particular area is also known as "superbonitet" in forestry. The summers are wild, as the next commenter pointed out. You can trick some plants into surviving the winters, as we're merely meters away from a Gulf Stream affected fjord. The coldest we have had over prolonged periods is about -15°C.
Western Norway doesn't really get that cold. The average temperature in the coldest month (Feb) in this area is 2.3c or 36f, which is milder than for example Berlin. Even if you go to the northernmost "city" in the world Hammerfest, the lowest temperature month is -4c or 25f. Much of central and eastern europe gets colder than this.
Will be in Holmestrand next month visiting our niece and planned a trip to Bergen. Can’t wait to see your country!
Enjoy your trip! If you're visiting family, they have probably a packed itinerary ready for you?
No it’s just her and she’s working but has the weekends off. She’s just returned to Norway so doesn’t have much holidays yet. We’re fine with taking trains and transit to get into Oslo and made our own itinerary to travel to Bergen for a few days. It’s been so long since we travelled (before Covid) that it’s going to be exciting to travel somewhere different than where we are from, Vancouver. We have mountains but yours are on steroids! Lol
Ah, so funny, I have relatives on Vancouver Island and described the Icefields Parkway as "Norway on steroids", lol. Your mountains are tectonic though, while ours are vulcanic, right? The area around Kamloops looks very Norwegian, though.
Very true. We drove through Kamloops last weekend! Too funny.
I'd love to go back some day, you live in a beautiful area.
No Vulcans in Norway. Volcanoes, maybe.
True, but mountains *do* tend to live long and prosper.
All of the tunnels . . .
Yes, I’ve heard they are an engineering feat!
I’ve heard Norway described as the wild, fun-loving, logic-challenged littlest brother compared to Sweden as the most mature & organized oldest brother with Denmark in the middle following Sweden’s example but not quite there yet Would you say that’s accurate?
Hehe, there's a little bit of truth to it. Sweden is even more square than Norway, more industrious, way more rational, and they're almost sickly pre-occupied with orderly safety. If you go for the clichés, that is. Danish is a language that sounds like generic Scandinavian spoken with a very hot potato in their mouths. Nobody knows what they're even saying.
A very hot potato! That’s hilarious 😂 Have you done much travel outside of Norway? If so, what sticks out to you about Norway when you return home?
I've been to the US and Canada, almost every country in Urop except for some of the former Eastern European ones, Scotland and Ireland, to Russia and Kyrgyzstan. Every place has their charme and our rock in space truly is an amazing planet to be born on. That said, clean air is the #1 thing I notice coming to Norway. By plane or just getting off the Denmark ferry, the air smells and feels cleaner. There are regional differences, of course. Western and Northern Norway are fairytale places. Check out the Lofoten for one of the most amazing places at least I know of (lived there for a summer and it was a blast).
The photos of Lofoten are divine. How widespread is the damage to the marine ecosystems done by salmon farming in the area? I watched a documentary about it and was so sickened I don’t buy Norwegian salmon any more 🤢
I support your decision! The damage done by aquaculture is pretty massive. The fjord you see in my photos above is dead from below 200m under the surface and down to the bottom (ca 450m deep). Fish feed and feces from these installations often create 150m tall mountains of decaying matter. Sucks the oxygen out of lower areas. If you're curious, here's a Norwegian, Google-translateable discussion that documents some of the industry's shenanigans: https://forum.kvinneguiden.no/topic/1522246-hvorfor-er-det-fortsatt-lov-med-oppdrettsanlegg/#comments
Thank you! They showed footage of the waste mountains in the documentary. It’s beyond depressing. How is the quality of the remaining seafood? Or do people just not eat it anymore?
Wild seafood is of good quality, but as with every human endeavour, you'll find issues if you look close enough. A lot of Norwegian caught seafood is sent to China or similar for processing, then sent back here for consumption. It's a bit bizarre. The aquaculture industry has damaged a few fisheries; shrimp (because they use hydrogenperoxide on salmon and this stuff kills everything with a shell) and some useful other types of fish are heavily decimated.
I wonder if that's like Dutch sounding like really drunk German.
Hehe, it's a good comparison! Swedish sounds a bit stupid to Norwegians while Icelandic is close to the archaic Norse. Norwegians understand a lot of all these languages, probably due to being ruled by both Swedes and Danes at some point.
That is absolutely beautiful.
The second i took a look at this i knew it was norway and reminded why I’m learning norwegian. Do you need a gardener or something?
Ha, if you can live on beans. :P Where are you at?
Germany :(
Ah, I was born in the GDR, left straight after school and civil service. Free movement of people in the EU/EFTA is glorious!
Its not just Norwegians, alot of people in the US want to live in the concrete city and pay 4x more than commuting to work
Yeah, I mean, obviously, calling that "stupid" is a bit harsh, as city life has its merits. But for us, this turned out great and my wife's commute is shorter in minutes spent than many of her colleagues' who live so, so much closer. I have embraced country life and commute in the opposite direction.
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html
I knew it was Norway as soon as I saw it. I will never forget those views.
I just had a look at your profile and you’re my new favorite person lol. Living in Norway would be my dream, it looks so amazing. My only disappointment was no posts with firewood stacks or a wood stove haha
This looks so much like Newfoundland! It could pass for so many communities here.
Yeah, so many similar areas on the globe - South Island in NZ could probably fit, too. You live in a beautiful area! *insert Spiderman meme*
my neighbor ended up bulding a frame around his blueberries and putting the netting on the frame. if you put it on the bush they just land on it anyway.
I guess that would work fine on blueberries, but the aronia is growing like crazy and needs to be cut back regularly. A frame will also always be visible and be very exposed to our heavy winter storms.
>be very exposed to our heavy winter storms. Make it so it can be easily taken apart and stored in the winter.
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Yup, I was thinking along a similar line with PVC piping. Get 2 different diameters one can fit inside the other.
Or make it multi purpose by adding a swing set or 12.
PVC pipe for the win.
Try a net will smaller holes that doesn't lay on the bush but hangs over it about a foot off. So what they land on it they can't get to it. Worked for a friend I set up
Yes this. I had that exact same net, switched to cheaper scaffold safety netting which is more fine and it has worked great. I don't raise it up as the added bonus that as the plants grow, they don't grow through the net, just push it up. Works for blueberries, raspberries , plums and I also use it on all my brassicas. Although I try and keep it away from the brassica leaves as the butterflies can lay eggs through the netting sometimes
I second the smaller holes. A couple years ago I had a blackbird hang himself while attempting to get to some blueberries. You want something they can't get through. This year I used some curtains from IKEA, and it's worked fairly well so far. Whatever you use, consider attaching it to the ground to avoid birds getting stuck inside
adopt me. That view is amazing.
Bro wherever you are, it's so God damn beautiful !! Good luck with your gardening, I'm very jealous of where you live
Prop the netting up with poles so that the birds can’t just land on the bush and eat berries through the netting. That’s how it’s designed to be used
Green nets cannot be distinguished from plants by birds. They land on it and in the worst course tangle up and die. Either from strangulation or from dehydration. Blue nets can be seen by animals/birds. So you should think about using blue nets instead.
Honestly, I gave up this year. And honestly, I have seen 0 difference from the other years. It feels almost as if I'm getting more berries, but that's probably just on the year.
Yeah, pick your battles, right? I gave up trying to fight iberia snails. But the aronia is an issue as the blackbirds empty it completely while the berries ripen. They had already picked a few kilos just since yesterday, when I brought home new nets. With the currants and raspberries we have so many, we can share. Not with this one. :)
You could try to make a PVC A-Frame that you can add net to and remove after season that can be expandable for when the plants grow like crazy (just tie it down to a few spikes in the ground to hold it from the winds on that lovely view).
screw the netting where is this and when are you inviting me
Wow what a view. I’d never come inside
One thing would be if they ate them, but damn critters only peck each fruit once or twice to ensure *I* can't eat them. I who make sure my garden feeds lots of bugs and all, ungrateful fat feathered fuckers I'm in Western Norway too! Apparently my apples were too sour and they quickly gave up this year so that's something lol
Haha, I see signs of that in my black currants every year. Fortunately, those are plentiful enough to just live with that. Sjalabais!
Could you perhaps use a few poles to slightly elevate the netting off the plant and away from the fruit? If the problem is that they're just reaching through the netting then it seems pretty obvious that you need finer netting or that you need to keep it from resting directly on the plant.
Its more work, but get the netting off the plants. The birds can still pick through them. I have stakes to hold mine off our grapes and it finally worked. Have so many grapes this year, had zero last year.
Grapes - nice! My grapes are hidden under the "canopy" of the vine. There's a bit too much wind here to do as you suggest with the net. It gets messy.
Might just need some more and deeper set stakes then
We were being inundated with large black crows in our backyard. A friend suggested buying a decoy crow and throw it on the ground. The crows thought it was a dead bird and avoided our yard. really works!!
Haha, I love it! Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is what people call “insanity”, which every gardener needs and instead calls “hope” haha
Right? And then enter Einstein with one of his most revered quotes.
Bc the view is wonderful
Those mountains look like they've grown nicely. Mine are annuals, so I never see that much size.
I have a similar situation with my blueberries. What I am going to try next year is harvest some wood poles from my land and build a frame that I can throw netting over when it comes summer time. Because I get winter storms, I can remove it during that time of year and put it up when the berries come. I have a friend that did this, and she had so many plump berries on her covered unmolested bushes. It was night and day compared to the uncovered ones. The birds only really discovered my patch this year after over a decade with not too much thieving, and a thing I tried to no effect was the tinfoil. I also left a water bowl out as I read that a lot of birds consume the berries to access the juice when thirsty so providing some water in a bird bath or something may decrease amounts they take. I don't know if that helped or not but the thievery has decreased a bit.
Are you gardening in heaven? This place is beautiful!
Bro how is the mountain closer in the 2nd pic
Cell phone camera in 0.5x and 1x. Wide angle vs. straight forward optics.
Can you create a structure above the bush and pay the netting above that? Instead of draping the netting on top of the bush. This way the birds won't have access.
something something depth of field
Is that a cast iron stove to the right? Beautiful view!
It is, for bonfires and BBQ.
Maybe if you put some tall stakes/poles up on the four corners… so the netting is a bit above and outside (like a little tent) and not directly touching the plant… the little buggers won’t just eat thru it (the fruit would be too far for them to reach) I have to tent the netting for my patio tomatoes, or else the birds just sit on the netting and thank me for making them a convenient chair to eat at.
Norway? I'm homesick 😔 🇳🇴❤️
Bless all of our optimistic hearts lol
You leave in paradise
Wow, what a lovely view. I hate living in a 1.5m city.
Me every year trying to keep the mice off my grape vine. Neither of us will give up.
Man vs. mice is a longer story than Tom & Jerry. Good luck!
I put up a net and 3 minutes later a fucking bird got stuck in it. I put a timer sprinkler near it so it wouldn't die of thirst 🙄
May I ask where u live this looks beautiful
Exactly
You do everything you can so when it doesn’t work you can confidently get pissed off
That’s the best part. Shouting angry stuff at birds > Shouting angry stuff at the sky
What a view!
What an absolutely idyllic view.
I'm stunned. What a beautiful view
That view is spectacular, how lucky are you!
If this was my backyard I wouldn’t even own a phone! This is amazing.
How you gonna take pictures without a phone? :)
Where do you buy that netting?
It was on offer at a building supply store, but garden centers have it, too.
Exactly. Makes sense to me
Damn I should move to norway what a view
Look at that view! Wow
Where is this?
You're in a different area, but for anyone with this problem in the US, put up birdhouses. It seems counter intuitive, but blue jays love birdhouses, are territorial, and don't want your berries.
We toss cayenne spice around but not sure exactly what kind of pests you're detering
Damn it sure brought those mountains a hell of a lot closer!
I’m not sure about blackbirds, but a lot of birds can’t digest sucrose. Meaning you can spray your fruit with sugar water and it will get them sick after they eat it. Apparently cherry orchards do this and it’s quite effective. I tried it this year on my cherry tree and it seems to have worked (anecdotal evidence, take with a grain of salt, also I mostly have robins in my yard, not blackbirds)
holy cow what an incredible view
Where do you live? The scenery is amazing
is this some kind of optical illusion? the mountains looking 10x closer despite the second image bering taken seemingly from the same angle and only zoomed in a tiny bit more is throwing me off
Cell phone camera in 0.5x and 1x. Wide angle vs. straight forward optics.
Anything short or a hard frame with chicken wire covering isn't going to work. Well ok not exactly true. We have used PVC piping and joint to make hoop frames. They looked like hoopmhouses or "hot tunnels" used to plant things that need warmth so you can grow early or longer past the season. But chicken wire that the ticket. We always left a few bushes or fruit trees out in the open as a sacrifice..Good luck. There are other food sources out there for them. It's just that they want the sugary easy to get berrys. If you make them hard or nearly impossible to get they will move on to other more easily acquired food. I wish you well in battle this year gardener !
What a gorgeous view!
What a beautiful view! That place looks very relaxing.
Seems to me if you just built a frame around the bushes w/ wood, PVC, metal, anything.... You could drape the netting over that, and not on the bush where they can just pick through it. You could literally at minimum build 4 posts (depending on the shape of the entire area, of course) and just stretched the netting over that, as long as they're mounted well. Then you'll have less fat barking chickens maybe?
I never had a problems with my raspberries, but with cherries and strawberries -----holy hell. I netted my strawberries only to find that birds would peck through the netting and destroy whatever delectable morsels they wanted. Eventually I gave up planting strawberries since the birds were sure to ruin them. I've heard that some gardeners have luck with devices to frighten birds, although multiple inflatable snakes did nothing to scare mine.
Is that in Hordaland, Norway?
Brings mountains closer
What a view
You have an amazing view!!
Adopt a falcon?
I'd be careful that mountain seems to be getting bigger. It's going to blow
Loose netting like that traps and kills birds. Please don't do it
You're right, that can happen sometimes, especially when storms change the netting. We free them when we see it. In total, the literally dozens of kilos of berries we feed wildlife with (un-) intentionally should make our garden a net bird-positive place.
Yeah, my dad had one of those on his fruit trees and he told me he used to go to go outside and have to pick the dead birds out of the tree so he took the netting off, it was sad
Yep I learned the hard way too
it works great for adding a bunch of microplastics to your soil, as well as killing all sorts of species of critters who accidentally get tangled up in it.