Have you ever wondered how to keep birds off fruit trees?
Today’s gardening tip is cheap and cheerful, just like me!
This tip actually came from my Mother-in-Law, but I have done this for several years now, and it has worked for me as well! Don’t worry, she’s not one of those mothers-in-law! She’s great and she has a super-simple trick to help keep birds off fruit trees and berry bushes!
What you will need:
- Old CDs
- String
- Trees
That’s it! This is so easy!
Simply take old CDs, tie a piece of string or yarn through the hole, and hang them from your trees like Christmas ornaments! I had a group of girl scouts come out and visit the farm one day, and I Tom Sawyered (yes, I can use that as a verb if I want to!) them into helping me make a bundle of these in no time! They even hung them and thanked me for letting them help. Boy that Tom Sawyer was a genius!
Eric gets a lot of useless CDs with a product they sell at work, so he’s usually willing to bring me a big stack instead of throwing them out, but you could use broken CDs, unfortunate purchases from the past, or you could even hit the thrift store for some cheap discs to use!
Tangent alert!
As I’m typing this, I am seeing quite a pattern of me using up garbage from Eric’s work on my little homestead, and it is making me giggle! I use his paper shreds in my barn, his pallets in my garden and for building all sorts of things around here, and now I’m showing how I use his trash CDs. Oh, and he also brings me old tires, from which we have made a swing, goat toys and a holder for the pig’s bucket! It kind of makes me wonder what else they throw away that I could use!
But back to my original story, light bounces off the CDs and scares the birds away. Of course you will always have one or two tough old birds who aren’t scared of anything, but this does work very well! Just a word of warning though, Eric and the kids find these hanging CDs irresistible whenever the BB gun *affiliate link* comes out, so I have to replace broken ones often.
On the bright side, it’s better than when they shot the plastic bucket that I left near my garden one day. I’m still using it with holes in it. They prefer to say they added drainage. Y’all already knew my family was crazy, right?
So, do you have any tricks to help keep birds off fruit trees? I would love to hear it!
If you like this, you might also like my “Garden Fresh” Pinterest Board! And of course, be sure to sign up for Beulah’s mooooooooosletter to make sure you don’t miss the next time I turn trash from Eric’s work into homesteading gold!
***This post contains affiliate links. A small percentage of the purchase price of items bought here will go toward keeping this blog up and running and food in Beulah’s bowl, so thanks!***
Great idea for keeping birds away! Do you have a way to keep squirrels away from birdfeeders/birdseed that actually Works?!!!
Sadly no, I just resign myself to feeding the squirrels too! 🙂
Thanks for the tips and that gives me the idea to sell my scrap CDs. We are a CD manufacturer and we do have a lot of scrap CDs. Instead of dumping them to the landfill I finally find a good use of these CDs. For that I have created a web page for people who don’t have to forego their own CD collection.
http://www.newcyberian.com/cd-for-fruit-trees.html
Rock on! Way to recycle!
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I use old cds in my vegetable garden. It keeps critters away from my veggies just as well as it keeps birds out of fruit trees.
NOTHING keeps squirrels off bird feeders but baffles. And don’t place feeders too close to something they can jump above the baffle from.
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They actually sell bird feeders that do not allow squirrels in it. When they jump on the ledge of the feeder, their weight makes all the holes close up. It works with even small squirrels. My aunt has them. Birds eight almost nothing so their weight isn’t enough to make it close up.