The Sweet Garden Hack That Can Keep Birds From Eating Your Berries

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You've spent hours fertilizing your soil, pulling weeds, and watering the berry bushes you brought home from the garden center. Yesterday, your plants were full of ripening fruit, but today there's not a berry in sight. Bird bandits have taken every last one. This tale of woe is painfully common, but it is preventable. The first step is accepting that many birds are berry fanatics. Bluebirds, catbirds, mockingbirds, and waxwings all fall into this category. Whether you're growing sweet blueberries or tart cranberries, these creatures will eat as many as they can get. Even if you build them houses and fill feeders with their favorite seeds, they're going to plunder your harvest. After all, human manners don't apply to them. Once you've made peace with their adorably rude ways, it's time to build a berry protection strategy for your garden. One tactic to consider invokes the power of Kool-Aid Man, the wall-breaking, refreshment-slinging cartoon pitcher that revolutionized 1970s advertising. 

According to the University of Massachusetts Extension, a jug of grape Kool-Aid can help keep birds away from your berries if you prepare it just right. The secret to its success is methyl anthranilate. Birds are disgusted by the taste of this grape-derived compound, and it's so effective that it's used in commercial deterrents such as Rejex-it. Other flavors of Kool-Aid won't have the same effect, so be sure to reach for the purple packet to try this hack. If lots of birds are flocking to your berries, you can pair grape Kool-Aid with another deterrent by hanging shiny CDs on your fruit plants.

Grape Kool-Aid keeps berries out of beaks if you prepare an extra-strong batch and spray it on your plants at the right time. To make your bird deterrent, you'll need four packets of Kool-Aid mix. Each packet should contain 0.14 oz. of grape-flavored powder, which typically yields a half-gallon of the purple beverage. In this case, you'll be blending all four packets with 1 gallon of water, so the resulting liquid will be twice as concentrated as usual. 

Place some of your purple liquid in a spray bottle and spritz it on fruit that's starting to ripen. Be sure to cover the surrounding foliage as well. Birds may stop by to sample your berries, but they'll soon learn that these treats taste like methyl anthranilate. After this, they'll go elsewhere for their fruit fix. Repeat the Kool-Aid treatment a few times during the growing season if your garden gets lots of rain or birds continue to visit your berry bushes.

Don't worry if grape flavor isn't appealing. The flavor will disappear when you rinse the harvested berries. They may be slightly more purple than normal, though. For picture-perfect berries, you can turn mulch bags into bird-deterring streamers for your garden. The sudden movement of these streamers spook birds, making them unlikely to stick around for a meal. You can also turn a milk jug into an owl decoy to scare away squirrels that dig up your garden and songbirds that steal your berries.