Honeyberry netting 2.0 (and a new honeyberry treat)

Last week, we discovered that the honeyberries on our bushes were just starting to get a little bit of color. They weren't ripe yet, but we knew our backyard birds wouldn't wait until they were to start helping themselves. If we wanted to save the berries for human consumption, we'd have to get our honeyberry netting tents up pronto.

This year, however, Brian wanted to try to improve on our original teepee design. Rather than covering each bush separately, he wanted to put up three frames—one at each end, plus an extra one for support in the middle—and cover the entire row with one giant piece of netting. This way, we'd be able to duck under the netting and work our way along the row, picking berries off each bush in turn, rather than wriggling into and out of the tents one at a time. He also believed it would be easier to set up one big tent than to put up and take down a bunch of individual frames and cover each one. I was a bit more skeptical, since I feared one big piece of netting would be more unwieldy to work with than several small ones. But since he was the one doing most of the work, I figured it couldn't hurt to try it his way.

Fortunately, we didn't have to buy any new materials for this project. We already had a big roll of bird netting that we'd scavenged off the curb on bulk trash day, and we had the six lengths of PVC pipe that we'd used to make our two original berry tents. To make the third frame for the middle, Brian dug into his stash and pulled out the narrower PVC pipe that we'd used for our very first garden trellis before figuring out we needed something sturdier. For nearly 20 years, he'd been holding on to this just in case we could use it one day, and now that day had come.

Brian then did a little experimenting to figure out the best way to arrange the pipe frames for his new design. He set up the first frame in roughly the same place it would go to cover just the one bush at the near end of the row, but skewed a bit more toward the outside and with the front legs a bit closer together. This made the whole frame taller to create as much vertical space as possible under the netting. He set up the second frame in a mirrored position at the other end of the row. Then he played around with the pieces of narrower pipe to figure out the best arrangement for the central trellis before cutting them to size. As he'd done with the first set of trellises, he drilled holes in the ends of the pipes to thread the string through, making it easier to tie them together.

Then came the tricky part: deploying the netting. We got out the big roll and worked in tandem to unspool it, with me in charge of holding the loose end down while he rolled it out across the yard in front of the bushes. When he'd unrolled enough to cover the entire row, we picked up the loose end and draped it over the trellis at the near end, making sure it reached all the way to the ground on all sides with room to spare. Then I held that piece in place while Brian lifted the unrolled netting over the middle trellis and finally over the end one, all while it remained attached to the roll. Only when we had the whole thing in place and were sure it covered all the frames fully did he cut it off.

Next we needed a way to secure the netting in place. With the mini-tents, we'd simply draped the netting over each set of poles and held it down with rocks, but for this big tent, we wanted something to hold it in place at the top of each frame so it wouldn't sag too much. I suggested rubber bands, and as it happened, Brian had a whole bunch of them out in the shed that he'd recently discovered just sitting in our back yard near the fence. (His best guess was that some critter had dragged them in there and left them, though he had no idea why.) They turned out not to be very good rubber bands, as several of them broke while we were trying to wrap them over the ends of the poles, but eventually we managed to get one in place on the top of each frame.

That took care of the top of the frames, but we still needed something to hold the netting down at ground level. In fact, we got a vivid demonstration of why this was necessary, as two birds managed to get under the netting during the brief time it was unsecured and were flapping around in a panic trying to escape. After shooing them out, we made sure they wouldn't get back in by covering the netting with rocks. Luckily, we had plenty of these, because we'd hauled away several buckets that my parents didn't want during my Mother's Day patio cleanup. They even gave us several slate flagstones they were no longer using, allowing Brian to replace the one he'd scavenged from his backyard rain channel to repair the damaged path in our front yard. On the western end of the honeyberry hedge, we tucked the edge of the netting under these slate pavers to secure it; on the north side, Brian shoved it under the big concrete blocks lining the fence. Along the other two sides, we used the biggest rocks out of the collection we'd hauled home from my parents' place, one every 8 inches or so. 

This new, all-in-one honeyberry tent is a bit harder to get into than the old, individual tents. Since it's all one big piece of netting with no openings, you have to remove all the rocks along a stretch about eight feet long to give you enough slack in the net to squeeze under. But once you're in, you can move about pretty freely, crawling from bush to bush to harvest from each of them in turn. Eventually, we'd like to replace it with some sort of more permanent structure that will require less setup work each year and be easier on our aging backs and knees. But on the whole, this design is probably a bit easier to set up and use than the single-bush teepees, and it won't take up much more room in the shed during the off-season.

Safe under their new protective cover, the honeyberries are ripening rapidly. Most of the ones nearest the house have turned a lovely deep blue, and we've already gathered about a cup of fully ripe ones. To celebrate the harvest, Brian decided to try something new: honeyberry ice cream. Here's his improvised recipe:

Mash 1/2 cup honeyberries with 3 Tbsp sugar and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla. Let it sit awhile to get juicy. Add 2 Tbsp soy milk and mix thoroughly. Stir together with 1/2 cup Country Crock Dairy-Free Whipping Cream (our current favorite now that Trader Joe's vegan whipping cream has been discontinued) and chill for several hours. Churn it to soft-serve consistency in an ice cream maker and transfer to the freezer to set fully. 

The finished product has a vivid pink color and a powerful fruity flavor—a bit too powerful for Brian's taste, in fact. He's thinking of reducing the amount of fruit next time and possibly increasing the amount of vanilla to counterbalance the acidity of the berries. But speaking for myself, I think it's lovely just the way it is.