I had been watering, up-keeping, caring, loving, and checking every day my gorgeous and succulent Roma tomatoes, not to mention investing five months of my precious time. Until finally one morning, they looked ready to form part of my daily salads. I checked one last time, in spite of them being crispy, shiny, and complete red, I decided they could use another extra six hours of sun, and I would harvest them in the afternoon, and use them for dinner.

Then I go to spend another day working at the office, thinking my delicious tomatoes would be ready when I come home. The first thing I do after coming home is to head to the vegetable patch, and Oh Surprise! My tomatoes were all eaten by wild birds! How could that happened? Just six hours before they were the perfect picture of healthiness! And to my dismay, all I had left was about twenty percent of each tomato.

Then I decided that it won’t happen again. I was willing to invest countless nights of watering, arthritis knee pain from cleaning the bad weeds, not to mention my time invested on Youtube, learning  new techniques on how to grow the best tomatoes in Bernalillo. But in order to harvest tomatoes the next year, I needed to come up with ideas to get rid of those evil birds, or at least, to keep them away from my vegetables.

Finally, I decided to try a scarecrow. At the beginning I was a little skeptical, I did not understand how a static human figure was going to fool those little devils, and scare them away my vegetable crops. Then I decided that, even if didn’t work, it will still make a pretty fall decoration for the garden, and I will keep looking for other ways to protect my peppers and pumpkins.

So there I go: I started gathering ideas, materials, old rags, old newspapers, and some hay. In a matter of hours, I had a very elegant and good looking scarecrow, overlooking my garden. I decided it wasn’t scary enough but seemed very real and I like it.

To my surprise, my handsome scarecrow worked very well in keeping away the birds, and this is when I decided that I would keep a permanent scarecrow in all my crops.

I have been making scarecrows for approximately five years now, and thorough my experience, I learned the following facts about how to make scarecrows work for you:

  1. A female figure works better than a male figure.
  2. Leave them some moving parts, that will flap with the wind, such loose clothes, pieces of hay as hands, or attach pieces of ribbon to the body.
  3. Metallic or shiny materials scare the birds away.
  4. Bright and obnoxious colors keep birds away your garden.
  5. Make them look real, as close as possible to a human.
  6. Animal shapes work too, but for me, humans did the job.

I hope this helps in your search for the perfect scarecrow, I would like to hear your comments or advise and learn what had worked for you.