It’s definitely worth the trouble. I used this one 10’x10’ Insect Barrier Netting Bag with Zipper | Agfabric for my Carmine Jewel cherry this year and saw a huge difference. Put it on when the cherries are still green - no insects (especially the maggots of cherry flies), no birds, no chipmunks and all beautiful ready to eat dark red cherries in early June.
It will definitely work on your cherries. BTW, we are not that far and share similar climate except I am about 1 zone warmer.
What do you do with them?
All of my thinned fruitlets get tossed.
I guess I am wondering if you compost them, give them to a pig farmer, or throw them in the woods. Sometimes green fruit is used in pickling, like a chutney, my Mom would have found a use for them, she threw almost nothing out. The ol’ “waste not, want not” Depression-era child syndrome. 
1 Like
I’m in the suburbs, so they go out with the trash, or when I make a clean green run to the dump.
My cherry trees can be protected by bird net. I just was behind this year. My neighbor covered her trees. So did I. We used different materials. Hers was lighter. Mine was professionally made called Kootenay Covers. The material was heavier and did not breathe as well as I expected. The result was very poor.
Cover a tree was a big pain. Thank you but not my cup of tea any more.
Very interesting netting.
I would not call it the worst task – that would be bending over and picking up sticks after pruning pome fruit.
One hard part about thinning is the feeling I am engaged in orchard vandalism.
The second hard part is that the work is tedious, and it gives me time to think about inviting my brother-in-law into the orchard coming in October to pick for his household. He picks really fast and drops fruit.
2 Likes
An alternative to bird netting: in a ratio of four packets per gallon of water, take grape and only grape unsweetened Kool-aid and spray it in your fruit trees. You don’t need to do a lot. It repels birds by irritating their lungs so they stay away, and by my observations it clearly repels squirrels as well. Raccoons and possums, apparently not so much, though, so this year I bought some Erva bunny cages and put them around the bases of several of my fruit trees–but not all, because they were expensive and I wasn’t sure how much this might work.
For a little more information on the Kool-aid, see here: Grape Koolaid to repel birds
The result is, one peach tree that didn’t get an Erva cage was stripped bare the moment the fruit started to turn pinkish, while right next to it, a peach tree that did remained and still remains loaded with fruit. Note that both are along the fence line and easily accessed by squirrels if they wanted to. This is the first year they didn’t want to. (Note that there may be fewer of them this year due to the extreme drought in California, although they’re definitely still out there.) I’ve watched them run down the fenceline and then exit stage left leaping away from the Kool-aid trees and into the neighbor’s fruitless one on the other side.
I didn’t anchor the cages down, even though they came with stakes: I wanted them to jostle a little to spook anything that tried to climb over them. Clearly, that worked! I planted my trees seven or eight years ago and this is the first year I’ve had full trees of ripening fruit left untouched and the first year we got to pick our sweet cherries as well as the sour ones, which birds like but critters don’t.
Another factor may be that squirrels don’t seem to like a tree with a cage at the bottom barring their way from running down it and away, so there’s now one around my fig tree as well.
Good luck!
3 Likes
Someone has mentioned about grape Koolaid a couple years ago. I can’t remember the result.
Re. Erva cage. Squirrels are no dummy. They go for an easy tree first. I am not sure if it will work once they have no easy target. Those Erva cages do not look difficult for a determined squirrels to climb on them.
funnels made from flashing aluminum attached to tree trunks are the only things that are proved to work against squirrels, granted the tree must not be near other trees so squirrels cannot jump from those trees.
The grape Kool-aid may well have been what did it for the squirrels.