On Sat, 27 Jun 2009 11:55:10 +0100, mark wrote:

They seem to like broccoli! Mine at least.

I was wondering if I made a thin ply silhouette of a hawk and dangled it
over the veg. area would it do any good.

As for suggestions involving shotguns etc., not helpful, not original.

Thanks

mark

Netting will not only exclude the pigeons but also the cabbage-white
butterflies

An old fashioned remedy: Take a largish oval potato, take several long feathers, stick two or three in one end of the potato to resemble the sharp tail of a hawk, stick in the others to make wings. Hang from a string on a long, flexible pole. The birds see it as a hawk and keep away.

wrote in message ...
"wafflycat" writes:

I discovered that blackbirds are eating my strawberries. Until I
discovered this I was thinking I was crap at growing strawberries. Now
I know I'm not.

At my previous house I could always tell when the blackcurrants were
ripe because I'd look at the bushes and see they'd been stripped and
the usual perching places round the garden had little piles of purple
poo under them.

In this place I've not bothered with currants and mostly the fruit
stays intact. Last year the blackbirds ate most of the grapes though,
the weather meant they were smaller than usual and I came to the
conclusion that the blackbirds will scoff anything they can fit in
their beak whole. There must be some cherry trees with small fruit
somewhere around, the perching places have little heaps of crap
covered cherry stones under them...

Anthony

The blackbirds at Chez Wafflycat are quite open about consuming the biggest,
reddest strawbs. They are brazen about dining on the fruit requiring
multiple uses of beak.

"David in Normandy" wrote
The netting also help to deter cabbage white butterflies. They like to
lay their eggs under the leaves, and it puts them off if they can't
readily land there. In principle they could climb through the holes,
but this doesn't seem to happen.

I thought the 1cm gauge netting I'd got to save my broccoli from the
feathered menace would also keep off the butterflies off, but the ones
here seem to have some kind of Houdini trick to get right through it and
I still ended up with lacy leaves for the last two years.

--
Sue

"beccabunga" wrote
An old fashioned remedy: Take a largish oval potato, take several long
feathers, stick two or three in one end of the potato to resemble the
sharp tail of a hawk, stick in the others to make wings. Hang from a
string on a long, flexible pole. The birds see it as a hawk and keep
away.

I seem to recall Monty trying that at Berryfields one year and the
pigeons totally ignored it and ate all his brassicas regardless. Netting
is the only thing I've found that will keep pigeons off, short of
shooting them all.
--
Sue

"mark" wrote ...
They seem to like broccoli! Mine at least.

I was wondering if I made a thin ply silhouette of a hawk and dangled it
over the veg. area would it do any good.

As for suggestions involving shotguns etc., not helpful, not original.

We treated ourselves to a Fruit Cage (6m x 6m) and use that for our
brassicas. We use a 4 year rotation and move it around the plot each year,
takes the two of us a day to move.
The cage being tall I can simple enter and garden without getting caught up
in netting, makes life much easier.

--
Regards
Bob Hobden
just W. of London