"Steve" wrote in message
...
Puckdropper wrote:
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My mother always covered her strawberries with a net. She'd anchor the
netting with gallon water jugs, which made pulling the netting off and
putting it back on quite easy. She also used a fine mesh (like a window
screen) rather than something as large as you're describing.


I always just used bricks.

Fine mesh would be nice. Plants parts wouldn't poke through and get
tangled and it would be much easier to free trapped birds. With the
larger mesh I used, they seemed to always manage to get their head and
one wing through the hole. Sometimes I couldn't free them without
snipping at least one strand to enlarge the hole.


The past several years I've been covering by strawberry bed with a double
layer of cotton toole. I buy the toole by the bolt in the fall (after the
wedding season when it's half-price) at a fabric store. It keeps the birds
out and limits the damage from squirrels.

The bed has a border made from pine logs cut from my woodlot. The toole is
tacked down along one side with lathe and anchored on the other side with
oak or maple poles.