Anyone who knows me knows that I love my strawberry garden.
Anyone who reads my blog also knows this. It’s my kind of gardening. Plant once. Weed infrequently. Reap gallons of strawberries. Repeat next year. AWESOME. Please note: This post is very IMAGE HEAVY and may load slower.
One thing I get asked a lot is how I keep the birds (rabbits, dogs, name your critter) from eating the strawberries (or wrecking the garden itself).
The first year we had these berries established in this bedding area, we caught the dog and birds stealing the berries when they were just barely pink, and knew that we had to come up with a solution. Someone told us the get bird netting at the garden center, so that’s what we did.
That first year, we just cut of lengths of bird netting and spread it across the top and around the edges of the plants.
It worked but it made harvesting difficult. The berries would get caught in the netting and I couldn’t get them untangled. Birds managed to peck at them and we lost them anyways. At the end of that year, I found some of that awful leftover netting under our front porch with a very dead 3’ long bull snake caught in it.
The following year, my husband came up with a solution.
Enter: The Strawberry Frame.
I’m not sure where he got the idea, but he decided to build a frame for the bird netting to attach to, that we could just put over the plants and remove at will.
Lots of people have seen it and asked where we got it. Since E built it, I have tried to describe it and others have nodded in slight understanding… “ohh, I see…” but I have no idea if they actually know what I’m talking about. I probably wouldn’t. I’m a visual person.
Just for you visual people out there, I give you our strawberry frame.
This is the frame this morning, when we pulled it out of storage alongside our fence behind the shop. It is fully assembled, laying upside down on the grass. Our frame is 20 feet long.
We had just unfolded the legs so they were standing upright. Then, we picked up the frame and flipped it over, so the legs were under it. The PVC joints aren’t glued in any way. They all turn, which makes storing this frame SO easy.
We just turn the legs flat with the top supports of the frame and lean the whole thing up against the fence for winter storage.
What you can’t really see in the pictures above is that the bird netting is already attached to the frame.
When he built it, E used zip ties to secure it along the back edge of the frame only. Once flipped and moved over the strawberry bed, we just pull the bird netting over the top of the frame, down the front and ends, and tuck the edges under the plants.
This way, no critters get in under the edges.
Pollinators can still get in and out, and my trouble making pups can’t play hide and seek in there!
To pick strawberries, we just pull the netting out from under the front edge of the plants and flip it back on top of the frame. 
When I’m done picking, I just put it back down. Simple. We pick for about a month straight, so getting in and out of it is important! Update 5/25/16: We have used this same netted frame for the past 8 years with no need to fix it at all. It holds up the Inland Northwest winters stored along the side fence, and keep the critters out all summer!
I hope this has been helpful enough so you can build your own.
