Its been a summer of protecting our gardens…I’ve already netted the berry patch and only found 1 bird who managed to find their way in, which after some tweaking, I haven’t seen anymore.  We got delicious strawberries, raspberries and now blackberries from that garden.

Its been a summer of protecting our gardens…I’ve already netted the berry patch and only found 1 bird who managed to find their way in, which after some tweaking, I haven’t seen anymore.  We got delicious strawberries, raspberries and now blackberries from that garden.

The next area to be protected from squirrels and birds was our peach trees. We did a lot of pruning and other maintenance this year already to battle the peach tree leaf curl we had; then the summer storms have all but knocked off almost all of the peaches on the end two trees, so we wanted to save the fruit from the middle tree as best as possible.  Kevin made a tasty peach cobbler from peaches we froze last year, so I wanted to make sure we had the same success this year.  (He made fresh whipped cream to serve with it!)

We did a lot of research online, and many discussion boards suggested covering the entire tree (they must have smaller trees, because ours are about 15-16 ft high), which that would be A LOT of netting to cover the entire tree.  So, I selected to cover just sections of the tree that were fruit bearing with netting (as well as just use the left over netting I already had).

I selected sections of the tree that were bearing the most fruit and looked promising. I cut a large section of netting off, draped it over the branches and used safety pins (yes, the safety pins I have been saving from all of my races and bibs- again I’m repurposing this summer :), to pin the netting into place. I figure the safety pins would be easy to secure the netting in place, as well as easy enough to remove when I was ready to pick the fruit.

So far so good, I will keep you posted how my netting project works out. If all goes well, I will be posting about my frustration of blanching, peeling and freezing the peaches in a few short weeks!

How do you net your fruit trees?

Netted peach trees

Up close-branches netted only