Addendum: this was a good idea, but not quite good enough. For information on the next thing we tried, look at my post “How to keep birds out of your grapes, 2nd edition”. By the way, we are still using the same netting that is depicted in that post. It was a little costly, but in the long run, SO much better at what it was designed to do, and much easier to deploy. HMH August 18, 2012
One of the aggravating things about growing fruit crops is the struggle to keep the little birds and other animals from eating them before you can. I didn’t get any strawberries this year. The box turtles got the few that survived the freeze before I did.
If there is a good fruit to eat, the birds are right on that job, and they will keep on it until there is no fruit left. Not only that, but their definition of “good fruit” is a lot different than ours. They are not patient. They will start eating grapes the second they start to turn color, which is a good month before the grapes have developed enough sugar to be useful as wine grapes. The vineyard grapes are beginning to turn color, and it didn’t take the birds more than a couple of days to notice that fact, and start helping themselves to the berries. We needed to do something to keep the birds out while the grapes got ripe enough for us to make wine.
We were working in the vineyard today on that very task, when the irony of my attitude towards the grape poachers struck me. I was just thinking, as I worked my way along the row of grapes I was attending to, “HAH! This will keep the little bastards out of the grapes for sure!”
The thought had not stepped up onto the curb of the street in my mind it was crossing before I realized the “the little bastards” that I was referring to were the finches, cardinals, blue jays, robins, and other birds that I spend around $300 a year buying bird food for. Not only that, but I dug a pond and spend quite a lot of energy maintaining it mostly for their benefit. When they are out on the bird feeders and providing me entertainment through the window, they are beautiful, cute, funny; and valued citizens of the yard. But when they are eating the grapes? Well!
The first year we had baby grape vines, keeping the birds out of the fruit was not an issue, since we didn’t allow the vines to make any grapes. The second year, there were very few bunches of grapes, for the simple reason that we systematically pruned off all but two bunches per vine so that the vines would make roots rather than spend energy making fruit. That year, the birds were able to eat all the grapes on two entire rows in one day. We did some fast research and found information that indicated it is possible to keep the birds out of the grapes by bagging them. Jim went to a lot of trouble doing that, and it worked.
So, last year, having pruned off all but 8 or 10 bunches of grapes per vine, we used the bagging strategy. It had worked before, and we expected it to work again. Our birds were hungrier, smarter or bigger, or simply more clever. It only took them about two weeks to learn that they could tear into the bags and get the grapes. They got busy denuding the first row of grapes to ripen of all its berries, and we looked into the cost of bird netting for the vineyard. Rolls of vineyard netting are 14 feet wide and 100 feet long. It was going to cost right around $500 to cover the vineyard, and this seemed prohibitively expensive to us.
Besides that, the mesh size on commercial bird net is 1/2″ by 1/2″, which keeps the bees, wasps and wrens out as well as any bird that might eat the grapes. Since we are organic growers, we like having the pollinaters and small bug-eaters to be able to access the vineyard.
Enter my mother. She has a 100 foot row of blueberries, out of which she successfully keeps the birds. She went to the local iron worker and had him build her nice 7 foot tall arches, which she stationed about every ten feet down the row. The first year she used the arches, she purchased UV resistant bird net, and deployed it. The birds stayed out.
However, the UV resistant netting wasn’t really, and it was very expensive. She was balking at having to buy it every year, even though this was how it was possible to actually eat the blueberries she was growing.
Well, my mother raises cattle. The year that she was cogitating on the blueberry net problem was also a year when she had to buy a lot of hay. She puts up hay in a big round baler, but her baler is designed to use baling twine to tie off the bales. The bales she purchased had been wrapped with bale netting. It is a plastic mesh 4 feet wide, which due to it’s hexagonal weaving, will stretch to 6 feet wide. It comes in 6000 foot rolls. One roll of it costs about $250.
I’m not sure what made the lightbulb go off in my mother’s head, but she saw the potential of the bale netting to act as a disposable bird net. It took three lengths of bale netting to cover her blueberries. At that rate, she could buy one roll and have enough to protect her blueberries for 20 years at a cost of $12.50 per year as opposed to the $100 per year the conventional bird netting would cost.
In order to connect the lengths of netting, she was rolling the edges together and stapling them together. We mentioned our problem with the birds in the grapes, and she mentioned her solution for her blueberries. Not only that, but she offered to let us use her roll of bale netting for free!
So, last year, we proceeded to wrap each row of grapes with bale netting. We struggled with how to connect it along the length of the row. Stapling did not work for us, especially when we tried to stretch the bale net over the grape vines. And wire ties, while they worked, had to be deployed every 3 inches to be effective. That runs into a lot of wire ties in a hurry. I thought about dental floss, and tying that instead of wire ties. That worked pretty well, but it was very tedious. Then I thought of making a single chain stitch of crochet to hook the lengths together. That worked really well, but the dental floss was so limp it was taking a lot of stitches to accomplish the task. That was when Jim’s mental lightbulb went off, and he rushed off to get our roll of jute twine. I used that to crochet the lengths of bale net together, and boy was that ever the right answer.
This is what the “crochet” line looks like:
And this is what the vineyard looks like with the net deployed:
It takes me about 45 minutes to connect two pieces of bale netting long enough to extend from one end of a row of grapes to the other. We had to make 9 seams. We started working on it on Friday afternoon, and finished today.
The birds will just have to eat wild grapes.
A series of brilliant ideas, well done to you, your mother and your partner!
… Now isn’t that the sound of a back-yard bird pow-wow going on, trying to figure out ways of getting through that pesky mesh?…!
Unfortunately, it IS the sound of a pow-wow. The robins seem to be able to winkle their way in. Unfortunately, they are not so good at getting back out, and you have to go out and look for idiot adolescents who are trapped by the monofiliament wrapped around their wing. But this means that I got to hold a young robin in my hands yesterday as I untangled him. Boy did I ever get cussed out by its frantic parents, who fortunately stopped short of attacking me while I was working.
why didnt I think of that!?
Great idea, thanks for sharing
Solution to birds at the bottom:
we did a variety of things, had birds getting in at the bottom, tho they’d eventually find their way out.
worse, was that our beautiful milk snakes would get caught in the netting and die there.
solution: we got some of the 24″ (18″ would have been easier) rabbit wire – which has 3/4-1″ rows of wire at the bottom and then 3-4″ at the top. We put that around the bottom which discouraged the birds, but allowed the snakes to get in and out w/ getting tangled. Then w/ clothes pins, we fastened our nylon bird netting to the top row of narrow rows, covering the larger openings.
we can easily unclip and reach thru or over the wire to pick the berries, and everyone seems happy!
This was a great help, and living more less in the “city”, my parents have had grape vines for the last 20 years or so, with not any attention paid to them. I have been planting a garden the last 3 years and this is the first year to really concentrate on the grape vines, (2) parallel vines, approx 40′ long, 6′ apart. The birds reek havoc on them…..
Thanks again…..oh yeah I was able to find some netting @ The Andersons General Store (Cols., Oh.) for $12.99, measured 45′ x 14′ with holes / squares approx. 1/2′ apart.
Will let you know how it works.
Hi:
What a terrific idea- I have seven acres of Merlot grapes.
Where exactly would I find the store so I can purchase the
bale netting. It sure looks like it would do the job.
I am in Fair Play, Ca. Would any feed store have it?
Thank you Sylvia
ok what about an entire 5 acre vinyard……..?
Sorry. I only know what works for our small operation.
You could apply this but on a larger scale. have it more like a big net tent over the 5 acre vinyard.
I have used nylon netting (tule) from the fabric store and it seems to work. CH
Earwigs got into the tulle bags I made for blueberry bunches one year. It was gross. A robin got caught in conventional bird netting and died before anyone could rescue it. A friend says that hummingbirds get through her netting and suck the blueberries dry. My other problem is voles, so I’ll have to go deep with the barrier.
I think I’ll try this bale netting next spring. Fingers crossed. If this enables me to eat homegrown blueberries, it will be a first for me.
I have a small vine, I’m not even sure what kind of grapes they are, since we’ve never been able to try them. Mine is on the fence, and birds and other critters eat them before we even know it. Since mine is only 1 row @ 40′, where would I find this wire small enough?
f you read some of my other posts you will find that the bale wrap really isn’t that good a solution. Just about any nursery will be able to sell you 3/4″ mesh bird netting, which we have found works better than anything else. We use it on our plum trees too.
This product can also be useful for your vineyards:
The interiors of airports, train or bus stations often cover large areas and
require good quality sound system. Screamer can be used not only to
warn, but also can play music from external audio sources, transmit live
announcements about arrivals and departures. One of the unusual
applications is to issue sonic or ultrasonic sounds to effectively
expell all pigeons and smaller birds polluting interiors and
threatening the landing planes.
We can record many different signals on Screamer to let it effectively scare any birds eating your grapes, if interested please check:
http://www.telegrafia.eu/en/products/ascada/Pages/screamer.aspx
A lot of the blueberry farms around here use a similar device and it only works for a little while. Then the birds get used to it and ignore it.
hi,
that’s good point..cause of this, we can record many different kinds of signals, such as blasting or screaming- and ultrasignals as well, the birds will not get use to it…after some of time you can also change sounds there and record different…also you can play music there, so as you see there are quite a lot of options..
regards,
pawel
This is too high tech for me and the 6 little vines that I have just for my fmily enjoyment I need something simplier thatn netting them may be a fake hawk or something alone that line what do anyone think of this tactic?
Birds are not taken in by a fake hawk for long. An owl that moves its head might be better. Actually, netting the grapes is pathetically easy and works better than anything else. Most garden centers have cheaper net (plastic 3/4″ mesh) readily available.
Would a couple of “deceased” birds lying on the ground near the grape vines be a “warning” to the other vultures?
Birds are not sentimental. They wouldn’t care about something that was just lying there. They don’t even really care about fake snakes either. I’ve been in blueberry patches where the birds were merrily eating the blueberries despite fake snakes, fake hawks, fake owls, “screechers”, and bird scaring tape liberally diffused throughout the blueberry patch. The only thing they really were bothered by was the human blueberry pickers, and then only if they were right in the vicinity.
I was at a blueberry grower’s convention once where the featured speaker was a patch owner who had recently (at great expense) installed a cage made of chicken wire that enclosed his entire patch. THAT kept the birds out. As long as the door/gate was properly closed by the pickers.
Last year we used a black netting over our grape vines but the grapes were not as good. Is there something about black netting and not white that causes this?
Probably not. It is more likely weather related.