Lovely cherry trees of doom

In My Humble Opinion
1

Ever since I moved away from home I’ve longed for old-fashioned pie cherries, the sour kind, not the sweet. After much tribulation, due to heavy clay soil mainly, I finally managed to get a couple of Northstar cherry trees to actually grow in my backyard. A late frost robbed me of any fruit last year but this year my trees have quite a bit. Knowing that birdies love the cherries as much as I, I netted my trees. Without any major injury to myself I might add, which is amazing since a ladder was involved. Alas, the birdies seem determined to get to my trees anyway and the score thus far is 3 birdies released from the netting, 2 birdie corpses. While the neighbor’s cat is thrilled with my little backyard birdie booby trap I’m not so much. I’ve hung strips of aluminum foil on the outside of the netting and do spot checks as often as I can but I’m not sure this is helping. Anyone got any ideas on how I can avoid any more avian sacrifices on my conscience?

And a somewhat related question, how do you tell when sour cherries are ripe? Besides asking the birdies I mean, I don’t think they’re talking to me anymore.

2

I don’t know how big your cherry trees are, but my grandparents had a Northstar that was full size (maybe 20 feet high?). There were more cherries on it than they and the birds together could handle; every summer they picked about twenty quarts and declared themselves finished. Are you sure that the birds are going to strip all of the fruit?

Maybe just hang tinfoil on the tree itself, instead of netting it.

3

I know you can order something that looks like a mesh tablecloth looking netting that you throw over the tree–the birds can only get to the cherries on the extreme outside of the tree, there’s still plenty of cherries further in. Check out gardening catalogues.

4

I always leave out some detail or other in these things. I should have mentioned that these are dwarf trees. If I don’t net then I’ll get bupkiss. Maybe a finer mesh would help prevent the birdies getting stuck though.