velvet_sparrow: Thanks, always wanted to be "freakin' evil" (tough to get a sarcastic tone typing, that's my intent). Maybe I should have said that the VAST majority of the birds in my tree are starlings, not sure where you live, but here they are rats on wing and 'push out' our native birds, an invasive species. Frankly, I could sit w/ my 22 and 'pick them off' if I wanted to, starlings have no protection in my state. I have had noise makers, cut open pop cans for the shiney side to show and strung them up, silver ribbon, stuffed animals, plastic owls, whirly gig things, jingle bells on string, wind chimes, and for the netting.....It isn't feasible, this tree is over 30' tall and about that wide. It was old and neglected when we bought this place. Frankly, I can't afford the netting it would take to cover it. I also have known of cats that were hurt badly from being tangled up in the netting in trees, thanks, no thanks..... BBs are nothing but irritants to the birds (although if the crows continue to frequent my tree, that may change, gotta see when the season is for them) They are NOT 'terrorized all day' Good gravy! When I am shooting @ the tree (NOT birds, they would be dead if I did, I'm an excellent shot) that is causing sudden movement and noise to startle them, isnÂt that EXACTLY what the purpose of your suggestions? Difference is, my way is random takes maybe 2 minutes at any given time. In the 4 yrs that I have been doing this, it has stayed consistent, the birds take flight out of my tree, unlike other methods tried that didn't, because unless I move them frequently (which takes considerable more time and energy) the birds become sensitized to those methods. What I didnÂt say is every couple of days, I take my big magnet out and pick up my BBs as well (did that before I got my girls) and will continue to do it. For you to call me evil and sit in some holy judgment is unfair. I have asked some other questions here and have recommended this site to others as very helpful, specifically your answers. Your knee jerk reply is making me rethink my position, sadly.........T

Squirrels will kill adult birds at feeders also. When I lived around them I had squirrel baffles on the poles and all my feeders had grids. My platform feeder had a 1" grid over it also to keep out the starlings and cowbirds that bully the song birds. Keeping the feeders and birdhouses quite far from fences and trees helps also. Squirrels can jump really far. I have a friend who calls them flying rats. I also had a clear dome over one niger feeder. It's a lot of paraphernalia but I felt like I had to protect them if I was going to lure birds to the feeders. Here we have trouble with hawks that sit on the fence and wait for the quail and small birds to get distracted. There's kind of a downside to feeders and bird baths I guess. Birdhouses are easier to protect. Sounds like you have a good plan for the houses. So nice that you are looking out for the babies.

Semi, Fake anything, whether it is owls or snakes or whatever, only works for a couple of days before the birds figure out that the fake animals don't move and aren't a threat to them. I have two terrific scarecrows that a very dear friend of ours made for my garden (a most wonderful and unexpected gift), but many songbirds sit on the scarecrows and use them as a perch. However, the hawks (who are quite a problem and often try to get our chickens and guineas) seem to think the scarecrows are real, so they are effective in that regard. With strawberries, the first thing to understand is that every critter in your neighborhood that is an omnivore or herbivore will try to eat them, and this includes not only the birds, but mice, rabbits, voles, insects, turtles, etc. So, netting is perhaps your best bet. It needs to be raised up a little so it does not lie directly on the plants and fruit, or the birds will sit on the netting and peck at the fruit through the holes in the mesh. It also needs to be secured at the ground level to keep out small animals. You also could use a Remay-type floating row cover. I don't know if any place in Ardmore sells them, but think TSC or Orschlein's or Bluebonnet Feed might be the best place to look. (I haven't seen them at Lowe's.) These row covers are very lightweight and keep everything off the plants except for insects that can navigate their way up through the soil, like sowbugs and pillbugs. If you can't find floating row covers, the "sheer" curtains sold in stores are a reasonable substitute. Things that move tend to scare off birds more than things that are stable. There is a commercial product called bird flash tape that is iridescent and supposedly scares off birds as it blows in the wind. I haven't tried it, but have used surveyor's tape (you can get a roll for just a couple of bucks at Lowe's) for the same purpose. Strawberries are one of those crops that gardeners love to grow (especially new gardeners). However, they are VERY labor-intensive and are very hard to grow organically because keeping them "safe" from both pests and diseases requires a LOT of chemicals (esp. commercially). Some people have a lot of success with them. Others don't. I think Plantermunn is quite accomplished at growing strawberries, so perhaps he'll see this post and give you some tips. You also can go to the Noble Foundation website and read about their work with strawberry plasticulture. If I ever were to grow strawberries again, that's the route I would go because it seems very efficient and probably has a high rate of success. I don't grow strawberries myself because I think they require too much work/cost in return for the amount of berries you harvest from a small patch. (I did grow them in Texas, but I had a smaller garden and landscape to maintain.) But, that's just me. I have a huge garden area to maintain, so I can't give high-maintenance plants like strawberries the attention they really need. Good luck, Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Bird Scare Flash Tape

Terry, We never trimmed the laterals on my brother's blackberry plants because he was a really laid-back grower who liked to plant stuff and forget about it until it was time to harvest. They became huge monsters and were covered in berries, but not all the way down to the tips. If left to my own devices, I'd prune them for him in the years when I had time, but when I was helping him with his garden, I'd spend most of my time double-digging rows in the veggie garden and removing tons of rocks, and then enriching the soil and building above-grade-level raised beds atop the double-dug beds. (He'd had multiple back surgeries by then and couldn't even bend over, so doing that sort of digging and bed-building was something he no longer could do.) Thus, about the only attention the blackberries got was at harvest time. When I pruned his blackberries, I'd tip the main canes at around 4'and they they'd put out lateral growth. I'd only let the laterals get about 12-18" long. If you grow them that way, the plants give you bigger, higher-quality berries. I tried to treat my plants here the same way, but they always were pretty far down on my priority list and I didn't do as good of a job maintaining mine as I should have. The issue with not pruning them is that the plants become huge unruly monsters (I assume we are talking about the erect varieties of blackberries and not the semi-erect or trailing types) and you can find it difficult to prune out the old canes that already have produced. Also if they become big monsters and you're growing the varieties with thorns, they can scratch up your arms and hands pretty badly when you try to harvest them. Some varieties produce pretty far out but not all the way to the end of the unpruned laterals, but we never had them get bigger than maybe 8'long there on the rocky, caliche clay soil where there were planted. He had amended that soil with load after load of composted cow manure before he originally planted the blackberry plants. He had a separate row of blackberry plants in his veggie garden and they never did as well as the ones grown near the house in the manure-amended beds. The garden blackberries were doing well to get 4-6' tall in that rocky soil and you didn't have to prune them very much at all, if any, to keep them manageable. He didn't water them as much as I would have, so they didn't get really huge in that area except during a really wet year like we had around 1996 or 1997. Here in my dry red clay that stubbornly repels water, I'm happy if blackberries get 6-8' tall, and cannot imagine them at 12-15'. With all the drought in recent years, even my well-established native blackberry plants haven't gotten very big in recent summers and haven't produced much, but at least they have survived. I am a serious veggie grower, but less serious about maintaining blackberries. All my cultivated varieties of blackberries and strawberries have died the last couple of years because of drought even though I thought I had watered them enough. I was going to replant in 2013 if we had good fall and winter rain, so now I guess I won't replant until 2014 since we're in Extreme Drought. I do still have the native ones but they didn't produce well in 2011 or 2012. If you let your laterals get 12-15' long then you must have them supported on a trellis or fence or something? Otherwise they are bending down and touching the ground and rooting and turning your neat tidy rows into a big jungle right? I tend to cut them back exactly as OSU recommends when I have time, but confess that when it is one of those crazy, busy years, I neglect blackberries terribly. With all the recurring drought years, I cannot even plant them now where I used to grow them because it is too far away from any source of water unless I carry it in buckets (which I won't). I do a better job of pruning fruit trees than blackberry plants although I often thin tree fruit too late and really have to push myself to thin it as early as I know I should. It is about the same way with blackberries. By the time I am thinking I should have pruned the laterals, it is too hot and I am too cranky and I don't do it. I think you always will get larger, better quality fruit if you prune the plants as OSU recommends, but you might get fewer berries. When you have really long canes that arch and then the growing tips start sagging back down to the ground, that often puts some of your fruit at the far ends of the canes back down closer to the ground where the wildlife can and will find them and eat them or the fruit gets dirty from soil splash, which I hate. With the trailing native blackberries that grow here on the sunny edges of the woodland and the pond bank, I don't prune them at all. Those plants will eventually run on forever, virtually crawling across the ground and rooting into it every few feet. Eventually they grow deeply enough into the heavily shaded woodland where they seldom flower and fruit. If I was more attentive, I'd prune them and keep them shorter and more manageable there on the edge of the woods. A lot of the time, the pruning we humans do with fruiting plants is more for our convenience than it is something that they truly need. As my dad got older, he pruned his fruit trees less and less and found they still produced well. That made him decide that maybe they'd never needed to be pruned at all! I have not arrived at that point yet, but I have noticed that as long as I prune them well about every other year, they are fine. Of course, these are mature stone fruit trees that have a beautiful bowl shape already so I don't have to do much pruning anyway except to remove the water sprouts....and keep the limbs from growing out over the driveway where they whack the UPS truck hard when it comes up the driveway. Are you not pruning your canes and laterals at all? If so, how is that working out? In the hot, dry years I have a lot of trouble keeping the squirrels, birds and other wildlife from devouring the fruit in the hot summer months. We just have too much wildlife and they like the fruit a whole lot more than they like the vegetables. That makes me even less inclined to put a lot of effort into fruit that I won't get to eat because the wild things will beat me to it. Dawn