How to pick berries from a tall tree. Very handy cherry picker
When it's time to harvest, many happy gardeners start thinking once again about where to buy or how to make a handy device for picking cherries from a tall tree. This is really a problem: a large part of the crop sometimes disappears due to the inability to reach the top of the plant.
Features of devices
There are many handy tools on the market for removing cherries from the top of a tree, but you can do this at home as well. The manufacturing process is simple, and the materials that are required for this, for the most part, can be found at home.
When choosing a device, you need to consider several factors.
- Efficiency (how quickly they can pick berries and whether they will crumble or deteriorate).
- Safety (can they get hurt, etc.).
- Convenience (how comfortable it will be to hold it in your hands, to work for a long time).
- The length of the handle (it is important that it is long enough to reach the top of the desired tree and break off the berries).
Puller types
Each person should be guided by what kind of improvised means will be more convenient for him personally.
To harvest fruits from a tree, gardeners often use one of the homemade varieties of pullers:
- in the form of an iron can with teeth;
- a plastic bottle with a hard wire hook attached;
- a hook from a tube through which cherries fall into a bag or bag.
Out of the tube
For this type of puller, you need to take a pipe wide in diameter so that 3-4 cherries or cherries can slip through it at the same time.
Since the device will have to be kept on weight for a long time, the most preferable materials are aluminum or plastic.
One end of the tube is cut obliquely. The pointed end is cut into 2 pieces. The groove between them should be such that the foot of the fetus can easily be inserted into it. The resulting 2 ends are bent so that you end up with a hook. To do this, it is best to heat them up with fire and rest against something solid.
The other end also lends itself to heating, after which it is placed on a solid base (for example, a cut bottle), on which a bag or bag for cherries will be put on during collection. Thus, picking high-growing berries will not be difficult.
This type of harvesting device is the most popular because of its convenience, but not everyone has such a tube at hand in the country at a crucial moment, so you should familiarize yourself with other options.
From a plastic bottle
A homemade PET bottle fixture is also common. To do this, it is cut into 2 parts and after that the upper part is taken. A piece of hard wire is glued to it with a rope and glue or tape so that the shape of a watering can is obtained. The stem of the fruit should pass through the narrowed groove of the wire, after which, when pulled, the berry comes off and ends up in the bottle.
The design is simple to make at home, therefore it is popular with gardeners.
In this case, they try to choose a stick according to the width of the neck of the bottle, so that it is convenient to put it on or stick it. Some people prefer to use the bottom of the bottle.
From a tin can
This method is less common due to the fact that the resulting sharp edges can be easily injured.
It is not advised to use it, especially if you have small children in your family.
In a tin can, you need to cut a hole so that there are teeth on top in place of the lid that can capture and hold the berry. The jar is tied to a stick or aluminum metal tube so that the puller is not too heavy.
Usage
Depending on the type of fixture, its use may differ. It is important to take into account its structure and think in advance what difficulties may arise in the work.
Whichever option is chosen, its application will be reduced to one thing - to pick up a berry with a hook or a hook, and then, feeling that the berry is fixed, you need to pull it with force and remove it into a special container (jar, bottle, bag, etc.) ). Then cherries are poured from this container into buckets or boxes.
conclusions
Every gardener can make a special device for picking high-growing cherries. Its design and materials do not differ in complexity or inaccessibility, however, you should be careful and choose the material, as well as the type of puller according to your needs. Harvesting with it will be much easier and more enjoyable.
Absolutely everyone tastes cherries, they are used for cooking stewed fruit, baking, or consumed fresh. Before enjoying the exquisite taste, you will have to spend a lot of time to harvest.
It takes a lot of effort to collect
Fruit growers often find it difficult to pick berries. This is due to the fact that cherries are quite high and it will be quite problematic to harvest the harvest with your own hands. There is a device for collecting cherries from a tall tree. You should know how to use it to remove the fruits growing on the top of the tree.
Basic ways
There are several ways to pick berries from the top of the tree:
- hand-made assembly;
- picking cherries using homemade tools;
- using a harvester machine.
Combine machines, depending on the type of work, are of two types:
- A mechanical arm, with the help of which the berries are shaken off to the ground, having previously spread a tarp on the ground. Its principle of operation is strong vibration, which contributes to the falling of the fruit.
- Combine with arched frame. Passing along a row of trees, the machine shakes off the fruits and harvests on a conveyor belt using special brushes attached to the frame.
The latter option is used in order to harvest from large orchards, from which the berries are sold.
To harvest from your home garden, DIY tools are perfect. These devices have gained their popularity due to the small amount of materials required for their use, as well as their ease of use and high efficiency.
Do-it-yourself collection devices
Homemade devices
Gardeners have come up with devices that make picking cherries much easier. They can be made from a plastic tube, a plastic bottle, a fishing net. They are made quite easily.
From a plastic tube
To make it, you need to purchase a plastic tube, the size of which is suitable for the cherries to pass through it. Pay attention to the weight of the tube. It doesn't have to be heavy because you have to hold it while picking the cherries. Cut the tubing obliquely on one side.
Cut across the groove into which the stalks will go, and bend it inward so that a hook forms. For ease of use, heat the end of the pipe with a fire and bend the grooves inward. Heat the other edge to form a socket. A plastic bag will be fixed on it.
Crocheted fruits are rolled through a tube into a bag fixed on the bell. The advantage of such a device is that it allows you to quickly and effortlessly reach the upper branches of trees.
From a plastic bottle
A fairly common method is to make a fruit collector using a plastic bottle. The plastic container is cut in half to separate the top from the bottom. You need the bottom of the bottle to work. Next, you need to cut a horseshoe out of wood, the diameter of which matches the parameters of the bottle.
Drill a few holes in the horseshoe into which you will need to insert wooden chopsticks - you can take chopsticks or make your own. They need to be glued to a wooden base using Moment glue or PVA, then tied to the outside of the bottle with a rope or thin wire. Attach a pipe of the required size to the manufactured structure using tape or electrical tape.
Using a device made from a plastic bottle is pretty easy. You just need to grab the cherry with this tool and pull it down. So the berry comes off and falls to the bottom of the container. After collecting enough berries, pour them into a bucket or other container.
From a fishing net
A fruit collector can also be made from a small fishing net. To do this, you just need to bend the wire hoop perpendicular to the handle. The same device can be made from wire and net (or a plastic bag).
To pick a cherry with such a device, it is necessary to hold it along the branches with ripe berries, they will easily fall into the net. Collecting cherries this way is pretty easy.
Conclusion
Having disassembled the step-by-step creation of devices for collecting berries, you can easily and with pleasure pick berries. Using them, you will no longer exhaust yourself with hours of painstaking work under the scorching sun when the time comes to pick cherries. Do-it-yourself fruit pickers will help you quickly pick fruits, be it cherries or cherries.
Cherries contain many essential vitamins that the body needs. The berries are preserved for the winter. Harvesting is not always easy.
If the tree is tall, cherry picking will be difficult. Sometimes ladders, stepladders, or even a special harvester cannot help.
There is a way out, you can make a device for collecting cherries from a tall tree with your own hands, then you will be able to quickly harvest.
How to make a cherry picker
If everything is clear with when to collect cherries, then how to collect it so as not to damage it is a difficult process for many. To make a device, you must:
Device for collecting cherries from a plastic bottle
- take a plastic bottle and cut it into 2 parts: only the lower part of the bottle is needed for the device;
- cut out a horseshoe-shaped segment from a piece of wood, the internal dimensions of which are the same as the dimensions of the bottle;
- drill a couple of holes in the segment: the diameter of the holes should be equal to the diameter of the wooden sticks, ready-made chopsticks will do;
- so that the sticks do not fall out of the holes, you need to fix them with glue;
- attach a segment with holes and sticks to the inside of the bottle, for this you can take a wire or rope;
- at the final stage, fix the holder to the container; it must be long so that it reaches the top of the tree.
The berry picker is ready. It is quick and easy to do. No need to spend personal funds.
Many people love to enjoy sweet berries. Preserves, jams, dumplings and pies are made from cherries. Before you start cooking, you need to harvest. It is difficult to get to the berries growing at the very top. You can make a device with your own hands.
To start making the fixture, you need to prepare the pipe for the holder. It should not be very heavy, it will take a long time to hold it in your hands. The pipe is selected with a small hole so that cherries can easily slip into it.
Device from a tube for collecting cherries
Further, it is cut off only from one side. A recess is cut out, which will hold the legs of the fruit. The groove is folded back to form a hook. If it is difficult to bend the pipe, you can heat it up and then bend it.
The opposite edge of the pipe also needs to be heated to make the socket. It is attached in a heated form to a bottle or other container. During the harvest, the berries will roll down the pipe and fall directly into the container, and not onto the ground.
Terms of use
When the device for collecting berries from a tall tree is ready, you need to learn how to use it correctly.
- The upper part of the pipe must be brought up to the berries. With attached sticks or nails, grab the berry and pull it towards you. She falls into the container. When the container is completely filled, the structure is lowered, and the crop is poured into a larger container.
- When using 2 devices, it is enough to stretch your hand to the desired distance, pick up the cherry and pick it. With such a device, it will be easy to pick cherries from the very top of the tree. The plucked berries will roll down the pipe and fall into the container at the other end of the pipe safe and sound.
The gardener can choose any method he likes and do it himself.
Now you can do without ladders and stepladders, they are very dangerous to health and life.
Conclusion
Cherry picking can be a real pleasure if you approach this process with the utmost responsibility.
With the help of folk inventions, you can easily remove the berries from the top of the tree. These methods are ideal not only for picking cherries, but also sweet cherries, plums and apricots. The gardener will be able to harvest the crop in the shortest possible time without spending a lot of time and energy on it.
This year I decided to break the established tradition and personally be present at the ripening of cherries. As it turned out, cherries begin to ripen at the very top of the tree, where the berries are best lit during the day, and maybe for some other reason - I don't know, I'm not a botanist (and they don't seem to be called berries, but how else to call them - I don't know either). And since there are no special ladders, scaffolds or other cunning devices for cutting cherries from the very top of the tree at the dacha, there is no desire to climb trees for 30 years, so I wondered how I could cut off ripening cherries.
First of all, I went to the Internet, but there was only one more or less adequate answer to such a request. And even then it turned out that to break the cherries, you need a long stick, a plastic or metal pipe, a piece of a bicycle tube, a rope and a bag to receive the plucked cherries. There were no drawings or photographs on the site, and from the short description I understood how to connect all this together and, most importantly, how to fasten the rope so that the ripe sweet cherry is clamped in the camera trim. Therefore, I was no longer interested in how the cherries would continue to roll down the pipe and fall into the package, and I began to develop my own system for stripping sweet cherries.
I had the main thing - a stick about 3-3.5 meters long. I went to the tree and made sure that I can reach almost any berry. It remains only to figure out how to pick the cherries with this stick.
Various ingenious systems like the one shown in the cartoon about Donald Duck and the badgers climbed into my head. Well, there are scissors at the end of the stick and again a rope. And if without a rope, then somehow expose the blades of the knives (I have old disposable ones in my garage). But then I came across the details of a children's metal construction set and I quickly constructed a fully functional system.
I took a strip, bent it to make a bracket, and screwed the bracket to the stick at an angle of about 40-45 degrees. And then to the top of the bracket, one more detail is heavier so that when the stick rotates, when the bracket instead of the horizontal one takes an almost vertical position, the detail lowers and thus clamps the sweet cherry that was previously caught in the bracket.
In general, the system turned out to be quite functional and even passed field tests, I even picked a few cherries. However, the sweet cherry grows quite densely, the distance between the sweet cherries is sometimes less than 1-1.5 centimeters. Therefore, the created model of the cherry-maker, although it passed field tests, it was decided to start developing a simpler, smaller and more reliable model. Therefore, I do not attach drawings and photographs of the first model of the cherry-maker.
And then I remembered that either in the "Young Technique", or in "Science and Life" in the section "To the home craftsman - advice" a similar topic had already been discussed and one of the folk craftsmen suggested using an ordinary hairpin for this purpose, which women use to create hairstyles a la "Butterfly". It is enough to bend one leg of the hairpin so that the leg of the cherry passes between the legs of the hairpin, and screw the other leg to the stick. Or maybe I saw something similar in a store like "Everything for the garden and vegetable garden", but then I did not attach any importance to it. Nevertheless, I decided to reproduce this design, and since there was no free hairpin at hand, I used steel wire. Now the cherry picker looks like this:
And in work like this:
I don’t give the youngest one (he is 2 years old) yet (he has enough fishing rods), and the older one (this one is already 10) tears cherries with this device quite normally, but he’s not in a hurry to put the instrument back in place. That's it.
P.S. As usual, it took no more than two hours to make a sweet cherry, but to write this article - and 3 days was not enough.
In the places where I spent my childhood and youth, cherries did not grow. At that time, these berries could be tasted well, perhaps in compote, which was preserved in beautiful jars and brought from Hungary. At that time, it was Hungary that provided the entire Soviet Union with delicious and beautiful preserves. Cherry seemed to me the most delicious and inaccessible berry in the world. I could not even imagine that fate would take me to the land where these same cherries grow right on the street and literally roll under my feet.
A little about the history of my cherry orchard
When my husband and I had a dacha. I ordered to plant several different cherries on it. Apparently the childhood dream of eating enough unusual and tasty berries has affected.And we planted several trees in which the berries should differ in color and ripening time. Not all trees have taken over. In all likelihood, we made some mistakes in planting them. But two trees still grew. One sweet cherry was early with yellow fruits. But we got a little more than a handful of berries from her, although she gave excellent yields. All this harvest went to the birds. They flew into a flock of cherries and quickly devoured them. What we just didn’t do. They hung up mirrors, made a stuffed animal, and hung tape tapes on a tree - our efforts had no effect. So I had to remove this cherry from the garden.
But the second tree is still alive and gives excellent harvests. And for some reason the birds do not show much interest in him. Maybe due to the fact that the berries ripen quite late. And what wonderful these berries. Large in size, almost black in color and taste, such as I once dreamed of.
Cherries live quite a long time; with a good harvest, several buckets of berries can be removed from them. And now I think - well, what would I do with so many berries if all our trees were preserved? Still, one cannot be guided by only childhood dreams when planting a garden.
How we collect cherries with a large harvest
It only seems that there is nothing to do to pick cherries. I bent the branch and pick the berries.
An adult tree is very tall, and in order to pick berries from it, you will need not only the skill to crawl well along the branches, but also some devices.
1. You need a high and sturdy ladder. It is almost impossible to do without it. With age, it becomes difficult to crawl along the branches, and with a ladder it is both more convenient and safer.
2. It is necessary to immediately foresee where you will pick berries. It is convenient to do this in a bucket (bucket), which can be hung on a branch next to you using a reliable hook.
We have it made of thick wire and has an S-shaped shape. At one end, the hook catches on a branch, and a bucket is put on the other end.
But it weighs, so to speak, stationary, while the ladder is in one position. You can move up and down the stairs and pull branches with berries closer to you.
3. Another tool comes in handy here. It is a long stick and crocheted at the end. Even long or tall branches can be pulled with this hook. When not needed, you can simply leave it hanging on a branch.
4. It is clear that with a bucket, even if it weighs reliably on the hook, it is difficult to move along the tree. Therefore, it is necessary to make one more simple device, which can be called a primary container for picking berries. And such a container is a simple cut plastic bottle. Available in different sizes.
As it is convenient for anyone. It is more convenient for me to work with a 1.5 liter container, and for my husband to work with a 5 liter container.
Hang the bottle around your neck. Those. attach a strap to the bottle and put it on the neck over the head.
You move around the tree with your hands free and collect berries in a bottle that weighs on your chest. It is very convenient, if only the strap does not rub the neck.
Well, now I will tell you about the very technological process of cherry picking. First, you need to put the ladder in the right place and make sure that it is securely in place. Then hang a bucket on the branch, into which we will pour the berries. Hang a hook nearby, with which we will pull up the branches. Now you can put the bottle around your neck and climb the stairs to the tree.
First, we collect the berries in a bottle, when it is full, pour its contents into a bucket. And we continue to collect further, pulling branches with berries closer to us using a long hook. When all the berries in this place are collected, it is necessary to get off and rearrange the ladder to another place, it is natural to transfer all the necessary devices there.
I want to note that with a normal harvest, one such approach with a ladder makes it possible to collect a whole bucket of berries. So you don't have to move the ladder often (3-4 times at most). But this is in the case of a good harvest, and it also happens not to be very good.
What to do if the harvest is bad
This year, due to weather conditions, cherries did not germinate well. The large tree had as many cherries as we usually leave on the tree. And this is about 5-6 kg.I had to rearrange the ladder more often and literally reach for each berry. Here such a fruit collector was very useful.
This is a 1.5 liter cut-off bottle with a long stick threaded through the neck and an angled aluminum fork at the end of the stick.
You take out a berry, hook it with a fork and pull it down slightly. The berry will come off and fall into the bottle. This is the mechanism of action.
Of course, when there are a lot of berries, it is better to pick them simply by hand and not pay attention to those berries that are in a hard-to-reach area. But when each berry is registered, then such a tool is very useful.