by julieg
12. August 2009 10:26
We had a barbeque with friends last night and as we sat down to eat the subject of growing our own fruit and veg came up (which seems inevitable nowadays) as we all helped ourselves to side dishes that included runner bean salad and potato salad, beetroot and griddled courgettes, all grown by one or the other of us. Esther and Ian have a large garden full of fruit trees and Esther described their efforts to keep the birds from eating all their cherries. They had put bits of foil on sticks and had even bought a pretend owl but the only real solution was to install a physical barrier against the pesky birds. They tied stones to the corners of what Esther thought was a really large piece of netting and threw it over the tree. Well, a large piece of netting needs to be really large to cover a mature cherry tree, and as Ian pulled the corners down, the netting collapsed together in the middle: “It looks like a thong on a bottom!” said Esther – I’ll never be able to look at a thong in the same way again.