If the birds will strip 4 - 5 cherry trees, how many cherry trees do you have to grow to be able to tree ripen cherries?
The answer is to espalier to a size that you can easily net them. The birds ravage my blackberries and raspberries that finish late Spring or early Summer if I do not net. Sometimes they are so aggressive that they get trapped inside the net. I think it is because they are raising their young. My later varieties are hardly touched without netting. One possibility is to plant a darker fruit that bears at the same time. Having paler red cherries next to some other black colored berries could make them less attractive.
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I found a simple trick that seems to prevent damage in some conditions. I toss 3 or 4 red mesh onion bags in my cherry trees and leave them year round. Birds investigate the bags and find them inedible then tend to leave the cherries alone as they ripen. This won’t work after the fact. If birds are already eating fruit, they will keep coming back.
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I have planted mulberry trees to tempt the birds away from my cherries, not sure that it is working. But it has been a treat seeing Scarlet Tanagers enjoying the cherries.
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I’m pretty sure that providing food and/or a place to live isn’t a reliable way of getting less of the thing you don’t want living there.
Unless you have a huge amount of land, animals will probably destroy as much as you can leave available. A person trying to be a dick would probably get bored and go do something else before they completely stripped and destroyed 100% of the crop. Birds, squirrels, deer, and the other rats have all day and live to ruin yours.
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no idea, i plan to try spraying mine with grape flavoring, aka methyl anthranilate. Ive read it can work for birds from a youtuber i watch doing something stupid (he sprayed it all over a field of sunflower seeds, which worked but it didnt supress the weed seeds). Seems reasonable to try lol
I will say abundance does seem to work for me in some regards. when my serviceberry was young i got no fruit from it, now its easier. It works against rabbits, maybe it only works for territorial species or something since its not like just more rabbits will come in to fight the buck that lives here
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Abundance works well for me on Goumi.
My two large older bushes produce so many berries that the birds eat all they want and we do too… and thousands still fall to the ground.
That does not work on blueberries (7 bushes) lots of berries.. but if I don’t net or bag them.. the birds will take the large majority. Once a blueberry turns blue… it really needs to hang on about a week to reach peak flavor.. and man the birds wipe them out if not bagged or netted.
I have the same problem with my concord grapes… if I dont bag them.. birds will take the large majority.
I have 2 cherry trees.. Lapins and Montmorency.
My Lapins was planted in 2018 and produced it first large crop of fruit last year.
It rained repeatedly when they were ripening.. and they all split and rotted.
Sounds like if that does not happen.. then the birds are going to get them.
Organza bags over clusters of cherries should work. We tried that with Monty and got perfectly ripened cherry. Birds did not bother at all.
TNHunter
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1 year I was OK with cherries. It was the year of the massive cicada swarms. I’m thinking the birds ate cicadas and not the cherries so much.
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possible, i also have a lot of native bugs around because of my many native plants, and i do not spray for pests at all. so maybe this affects things re. the service berry as well