Protecting Baby Fruit

In the orchard, nine out of ten of our older trees blossomed this spring and look to be setting fruit this season. (The new fig tree we planted at the end of April is still just a stick, albeit one with two small green buds on it.)

Our apricot is the farthest along, and although it's not a bumper crop, we have a bunch of small fruits:

And, as you can see, I spent some time this weekend rigging up a new anti-squirrel system on the apricot tree. I first saw this idea over at rootsimple.com and was able to give it a try thanks to lots of friends who saved up their plastic fruit containers over the winter. Grocery store berry boxes are perfect for this, since they are ventilated, and often snap shut. All I had to do was close them around our baby apricots (which I learned to do gently, since I knocked one off its branch by mistake). Hopefully these boxes will confound the squirrels, and we won't lose our whole harvest to them again this year. 

Here you can see a section of our newly adorned tree. Good thing we have a hedge in front, because otherwise passersby might think we are mental, decorating our trees with trash for Memorial Day. I just hope it works!