Hey Roger...

[Sharkey]

You'll be berry glad to see this...



It'll be a week or two before they are completely ripe and sweetened up for picking, just hope the damn bears don't get them first. Bring some big buckets, you'll need them:

[Truckingturtle]

Looks great, Sharky! I'll be there with my buckets in hand in a couple of weeks! I'll even bring Fred with me, and he'll make us some jam!

Roger

[Sharkey]

I went out yesterday morning to check the berry patch and found that some of the ripest berries along the outside edges had been carefully picked, presumably by deer, as they have been keeping the rose bush in that corner of the yard clipped to a nub all spring.

Time for defensive action!



Dug out the old electric fence charger, the one I used back in the city to keep the cats from using the floor of my work shed as a litter box. Pounded a few T-posts in shallowly, and harvested some insulators off of the posts around the house (the previous owners had electric fences ~everywhere~, so there's lots of wire and insulators). Wrapped the berry patch on all sides with two levels of electrocution, fired that baby up, and no more deer problems.

Don't know if this will work against bears, they are, after all, the creatures that knock over beehives, then sit there eating honey while thousands of enraged bees sting them repeatedly...

[Sharkey]

Roger, if you're going to come out to pick berries, you'd better start moving towards the car soon. About half of them are fully ripe, and the very first to ripen are beginning to shrivel and get moldy.

[Wallfly]

Fence chargers work on bears; professional beekeepers that move their hives to the mountains for late summer fireweed honey use a solar-driven charger and a single strand of wire to protect a cluster of hives.
If only it were so easy to stop the buggers from gnawing water pipes!
Wallfly.