Protecting the Pomegranates

by Terri

A long and sad tale . . . but with a happy ending. Sort of. For my husband’s birthday several years ago, he decided he wanted to plant a pomegranate tree. We picked it out at the nursery and had it delivered and planted. It was covered in beautiful red blossoms and I liked it right away. Soon the red flowers began to change into fruit.

And then the fruit began to ripen.

But just as we were anticipating having all this wonderful fruit right outside our door and the things we would make with it, this happened:

The birds discovered them and bored through the tough outer skin to the sweet insides, leaving us nothing but a shell.  All that watering and feeding and tending went for naught.

So the next year, my husband decided he would cover the tree with netting to keep the birds away. However, a quail got caught in the net and I spent a half hour cutting up the net in order to free him. It was traumatic so I told my husband, no more netting. And this again was the result:

The next spring, I went online to read about how to protect your pomegranates from birds and read about a method of stapling brown paper lunch bags over each piece of fruit. So we tried that with the 20 or so fruit that we had. We ended up with 2-3 pomegranates that survived to the time they were ripe enough to pick. We were beginning to think the birds were smarter than we were. Here’s a shot of one of the few we managed to harvest:

The tasty and beautiful jewel-like fruit inside made us want to try even harder to see if we could find a solution to the problem of the birds.

The next spring, I posted about my plight on Instagram and a friend suggested tying knee high pantyhose over each fruit. That sounded like a good plan, so I bought several packages of inexpensive knee highs and we tied them on.  It wasn’t too long before we found this:

 

The birds had torn open the knee highs and feasted on all the fruit. Those little buggers had untied the knots at the top of each knee high and helped themselves. The third time was NOT the charm.

So we have given up.  We now look on our pomegranate tree as a gift from us to the birds and we have resigned ourselves to buying our pomegranates at the store. I leave you with this fruit that we purchased from Trader Joe’s.  

 

A beauty, isn’t she? And so much easier than trying to outsmart the birds. We’ll keep our pomegranate tree and let the birds feast on it and from now on we’ll buy our pomegranates rather than trying to grow them. And because our theme this month is Word Art, I’ve even added a bit of Sue Cummings art to this image. 

Are you a gardener? Have you ever been outsmarted by Mother Nature and lost your harvest to some critter who got into your garden? Did you find a solution or did you have to finally give up like we did? I'd love to hear your stories and if you have a solution for keeping the birds from eating the fruit on your trees, I'd love to hear it. Maybe the fourth time will be the charm!