Oh, what a tangled net we weave

Last weekend, while puttering around in the garden, Brian noticed two things, one good and one bad:

1. Our honeyberries were starting to ripen. They weren't ready to pick yet, but it looked like some of them would be within a week.
2. The birds were not waiting for that point. A hungry catbird was already on the bushes, scavenging any berry that looked remotely close to ripe.

Brian chased away the invader, but he knew it would be back the minute his back was turned. So, not even taking the time to call me in from the house to help, he hastily ran to the shed, grabbed a roll of bird netting, and threw it over the bushes. He didn't bother to wrap each bush individually as he usually does; he just covered the entire row, willy-nilly, bending the bushes as much as necessary to fit them underneath. He managed to get the whole net in place and held down with bricks just before losing the last of the daylight.

So far, this hasty wrapping job has succeeded in keeping out the birds. The problem is, it more or less keeps us out as well. So while the berries have managed to ripen without further molestation, there's no good way for us to harvest them. I managed to get a few by squeezing my fingers through the netting from outside, and then I tried removing a couple of the bricks and crawling under the netting so that I could sort of feel my way around the bush while half reclining on the slope where it was planted. But neither method allowed me to get a good grasp on the berries and give them the very gentle tug that's needed to distinguish the ripe ones from the almost-ripe. So while I was able to harvest a generous handful, not all of them were ripe enough to make good eating.

Brian thinks we can this problem by simply uncovering the berries and re-covering them more carefully, wrapping each individual bush in its own piece of netting. This will allow us to wrap them more loosely so they're not all bent out of shape. But even with each berry bush netted separately, we still won't exactly have easy access to the berries. Harvesting them will still involve removing the bricks around one of the bushes, pulling up the net to climb underneath, and re-wrapping the bush afterward. With that many steps involved, it won't really be practical to bounce over there and pick a few berries whenever we happen to notice they're ripe.

I can't help wondering if there might be a more elegant solution. This site suggests enclosing blueberry bushes in tomato cages before netting them, but I don't think that would help us much. I've never seen a tomato cage big enough to fit around the largest of our honeyberry bushes, and even if we found one, we'd still have to unwrap and re-wrap it each time we wanted access to the berries. I was thinking something more along the lines of a tent, with poles erected between the bushes and the netting over the top. We'd only have to remove the bricks on one side, the front, to get under the netting, and the pole would hold it up over our heads so we wouldn't have to bend double under it. I don't mean a permanent enclosure, which wouldn't really work on that slope, but something more like this teepee arrangement made from bamboo poles and netting. We could erect the tent around the start of May, pop inside as needed to gather the berries, and take it down once all the berries were harvested.

Hmm...Brian did see a place a few blocks away where some bamboo had recently been cut down. I wonder....