Keep birds out of the garden

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"snake" So you’re growing your own food. Great! Then the birds come in and eat your plants.

Not great.

Birds like to eat seedlings and fruit. I know of several methods to keep them away:

Use floating row cover for seedlings. Weight down the edges — you can use the fancy pins they sell, or just use dirt or rocks. When the leaves get to be 4″ or so, birds won’t eat most plants. (This is what we didn’t do soon enough with our peas … and the plants never lived to grow up. )
Use netting for trees. We got ours at a yard sale last year, via Craigslist. You drape it over the tree, and birds don’t want to tangle with it. Theoretically. (However, at a pick-your-own farm we went to last year, birds were INSIDE the net – not a pretty situation. They were scared AND eating the fruit. So use with caution.)
Use CDs a la Juliette Binoche (who used mirrors) in The English Patient. We have strung CDs (obviously, ones you don’t want back – the old, ubiquitous AOL CDs were perfect for this) on garden twine. When dangled over your garden plants, they sway and glisten in the sunlight — making the beds feel too risky for birds. (Pie tins can work, too — and it’s worth a try in fruit trees.)
Cut an old garden hose into 10-12″ lengths and lay it in the garden. Move it around when you are out. The “snake” might intimidate some of your feathered friends. (I just spotted what looked like a canyon wren – perhaps on its way to or from the mountains — prowling cockily around our lettuce seedlings and threw a couple of “snakes” into the garden — we’ll see if it works!)
Make somewhere else more worth their while. Put bird seed in an area far from your garden.
If you’re growing seed plants, like sunflowers, try covering the head with an old pantyhose so it can grow or dry, but birds can’t feast.
Get a dog or cat. It’s not THE reason to get a pet, but if you are considering it already, add it to your arsenal of reasons why. Our dog tears out toward the garden and scares the birds away, and between him and the neighborhood cat contingent, squirrels never venture onto the ground away from a tree out there.