"My" blueberries

I was excited about my blueberry crop this year. Although the plants are still in smallish containers, this was their second year for me so should have produced quite a few berries.

You'll notice that I said "should have". Let me amend that statement: they did produce a decent amount of berries. The humans who live here didn't get to eat any though. Not one.

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But I'll get to that in a minute. First, let's just take a look at these little globes of delight:

If you want to know more about these shrubs, take a look at the post I did when I first got the plants last year.

If you want to know why we humans didn't get to eat any this year, here are the facts:

• Robins love berries
• Humans know when blueberries are ripe
• Robins do not, or don't care
• Robins are not satisfied with stuffing themselves with mulberries even though there are two heavily-laden trees in my yard and a couple dozen unripe blueberries won't make any difference to them or their chicks but they take them anyway even though they must taste terrible and have no regard for the human who uncovers hundreds of worms each year for them when tilling the ground and who doesn't bother them in any way even letting them nest wherever they want to so is it too much to ask to just leave the berries alone for a couple of weeks...

Whew.

As soon as I noticed that some berries were going missing (clued in somewhat by the robins that kept appearing on our deck), I got out the bird netting:

With the plants seemingly well-protected, I sat back and waited for the ripening to continue.

What also continued was the poaching, as the robins either found a way under the netting (I had to help one bird free itself after it couldn't get out and was fluttering around in a panic) or figured out how to push the netting down enough to reach the berries.

Since I was doing some traveling for work I didn't have time to construct a proper cage for the netting, so had to resign myself to the fact that I was at most going to taste a berry or two this year.

That's okay, as I really want to get these plants into either much larger pots or into the ground this year, and the poor crop this spring is just another incentive for me to do it.

Still, I get to enjoy these photos, right?

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