This weekend my strawberries have been mostly channeling the spirit of Ena Sharples. Saturday morning I was doing my usual patrol of the garden, feeding chickens, checking for eggs, quick survey of the veggies to see what's going on etc I was most indignant to find a half eaten green strawberry on the path. We had one lone strawberry beginning to turn red whose progress the girls were eagerly monitoring, turns out they weren't the only ones.
An unknown feathered offender had evidently nicked it, eaten the red bit and abandoned the rest. I suspect it was the parent and child combo I spotted this morning. I'm not a bird expert and have no idea what brand they were. They were a rather pedestrian drab brown though the youngster still had a fluffy comedy hair do and an air of gawky teen about him. The parent was hopping around the garden from the lawn to the trellis at the top of the fence and over to the strawberry basket with the child obediently following each and every move.
I'm now in the process of covering my strawberry baskets with netting that looks remarkably like a hairnet. I'm still concerned that they can poke their pesky beaks through the netting so I've added a mini windmill as a bird scaring measure and am surveying the house for shiny stuff I can festoon the baskets with. I'm kind of sad that my garden is looking increasingly demented with each additional pest control measure but, hey, as I read in the Half Hour Allotment book "I'm not a keen gardener, I'm a keen eater."
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