Garden Pests and Diseases: Blueberry bushes, deer and rabbits, 1 by LilyD5bSWMI

LilyD5bSWMI wrote:
I discovered yesterday that the deer and rabbits have eaten my blueberry bushes down to tiny little nubs for the second winter in a row. I planted a row of 2-4 year old blueberry bushes in my back yard in the fall of 2019. I lost about half of them after the first year\'s predation. I will find out in a couple months whether or not any of the remaining sticks I have back there sprout leaves and grow this year, but a crop is out of the question because the plants have too much recovery to do. I am hoping that some of you might have better ideas on how to prevent the predation. What didn\'t work: I installed a trellis around everything that I netted over. Apparently sturdy netting is no barrier to winter-hungry rabbits because the holes in it are impressively sized, and there is plenty of rabbit poop to attest to how busy they have been. This is only a problem in the depth of winter. We are dealing with city critters, too, so they are totally unfazed by repellants like cayenne, predator urine, stinky soaps, etc. I can\'t use a motion-activated hose sprayer in the dead of winter. I tried the ultrasonic repellents in the fall of 2019 and they were useless too. I\'m down to needing some type of physical barrier that goes up in the fall and comes down in the spring. What would you do?