On Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:42:30 -0500, Omelet wrote:

In article ,
General Schvantzkopf wrote:

On Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:27:26 -0700, Jo Green wrote:

On Jun 28, 2:24Â*pm, General Schvantzkopf
wrote:
I have a couple of dozen strawberry plants but no strawberries. I
assume that something is eating them before they have a chance to
develop, but what? Also I've only seen the starts of a few berries
so maybe my plants aren't producing at all. The plants look healthy,
they just don't have any berries.

I have a fence around my gardens and bird netting across the top but
it's not bird tight, they could walk in if they had a mind to.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

I live in Massachusetts.

Hi,

I have had the same experience with my strawberry garden. After many
hours of observance and much to my surprise, I one day found a
chipmunk running across the lawn with a strawberry in his mouth. He
proceeded to sit within view of where I was and eat the strawberry in
front of me. Not long after I witnessed a squirrel doing the same
thing.

When your strawberries disappear you immediately think insects or
birds.
My strawberry garden is also fenced in and netted and somehow the
chipmunks and squirrels find a way in to access the strawberries.

Netting with finer and smaller openings will help this problem.
Surrounding the garden with plants that chipmunks and squirrels do
not like such as natural insect repellant plants helps. These are
both good remedies but the reality is you will never totally protect
your strawberry garden from these crafty creatures.

I have millions of chipmunks, that could be it. My previous cat kept
them under control but he disappeared last year, I suspect that a
coyote got him. I don't want to risk the same thing happening to my new
cats so I'm keeping them inside which leaves me without a means of
limiting the chipmunk population.

You could try a low hotwire...

Does that work with chipmunks? Chipmunks can probably hear ultrasound and
at one time electric fences emitted high frequency noise when they were
pulsed on, that may have changed with modern systems I don't know. In the
1970s I knew someone who was suckered into touching his electric fence by
his dogs. He had put up a wire to keep his dogs in the yard, what he
didn't know was that his dogs could hear a buzz from the wire which was
inaudible to a human. After his dogs got zapped a couple of times they
figured out that the wire made noise when it was live. They then decided
to get even with him. He looked out in the yard and saw his dogs licking
the wire. Naturally he thought the system was broken so he went out to
check it. He grabbed a hold of the wire and got zapped, his dogs then
wagged their tails and walked off.