North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["William C. Garthright" <billg@inebraska.com>]

> I finally put in a one foot tall permanent fence of hardware cloth around the 
> bottom of the blueberry row, and now I drape the netting to overlap a few 
> inches with the fences.  Keeps out the birds without killing anything.  And 
> at one foot tall, it's short enough that it's not much in my way the rest of 
> the year.
>   


For most of my stuff this year, I put a circle of 3' chickenwire around 
the plant, then draped the netting over that. It seemed to keep the 
squirrels out, too, though maybe that's just because they didn't like 
the few things I had fruiting this year. But the strawberries only had 
netting, and the squirrels just lifted it up and went underneath.

Your idea of using 1' hardware cloth sounds interesting. On the other 
hand, I use the same chickenwire circles to protect the plants from 
rabbits in the winter. It's kind of a pain to set it up and then take it 
down (twice a year for each), not to mention finding a place to store it 
in between, but... not too bad, as long as it works.

Bill
Lincoln, NE (zone 5)

--
In each case, Mr Bush made a policy decision back in 2001 based upon 
false, incomplete, or misleading information and has since fought a 
rearguard action to prevent either acknowledging these deceptions or 
their obvious implication - that the 2001 policies should be reversed. - 
Chris Mooney