Picture this: Sicily, 1934. A young peasant girl walks in the garden… Oops! Wrong show. Don’t you love the Golden Girls? But I digress.

Picture this: It is a beautiful spring morning. Birds are everywhere. The sun rises above the mountain and soon turns spider webs in the field, below the house, into luminescent dream catchers. It is one of those spring mornings when all concerns, no matter how heavily they had weighed on your heart, seem insignificant.

From the window, I can see our first garden; a long, rectangular patch with sunflowers and corn at one end and strawberries at the other. It was a spur of the moment decision. We bought random seeds, tilled a patch, gave each variety of seed its own small territory within the garden, watered them and waited. It did not take long.

This was nearly 20 years ago. I grew up with a garden; a very well-tended and, I must say, esthetically beautiful garden. My father had taken great pains to design it so it would provide sustenance, but also very distinct beauty. I was very young then, but remember the taste of fresh string beans, straight from the garden, unwashed. Can you imagine? Unwashed, in the 1960′s, when the first defense against pest was chemicals.

20 years later, my husband at the time and I planted our first garden without so much as a gardening catalog for guidance. We were both Aries and each one of us as stubborn as two rams. On that morning, as I looked out the window at our first crop, I realized we needed to learn a trick or two.

My husband had installed a net over the strawberries, to discourage birds from stealing them. I personally did not mind sharing, but I could see his point that it was discouraging to lose our entire crop, even to beautiful winged creatures. That morning, however, I noticed something fluttering on the ground, at the base of the netting. I ran out.

A small crow had its leg tangled up in the net and was trying, in vain, to fly free. I rushed back to the house to get a small pair of very finely pointed scissors. I had no idea how I would manage to free the bird without risking having my hand shredded to pieces, but this did not matter. I could always go to the hospital; the bird did not have that luxury.

I took a moment to speak to it softly. What I actually did was to explain what I was about to do. I reasoned that it did not matter that the bird did not understand my words, just calmly stating the facts would calm us both; and it did. Soon, I was able to hold it still, allowing it to see my face the entire time so it could at least, maybe, get from my expression that I was not a predator. I managed to free it without a scratch to its legs and without it so much as attempting to poke at me. When it flew away, I sat there and cried.

I cried because our ignorance had caused an innocent creature to experience fear for its life, and I cried because of how it had trusted me in a moment of utter vulnerability.

We humans go to great lengths to protect our possessions, we even invent poisons to this end, until we realize that maybe there is a better, healthier way. It is, well, only human to want to care for our things and when those things are produce that provide sustenance, protecting them is the smart, logical and natural thing to do. What matters is the method. Had we used a proper row cover, the bird would not have been able to take our berries and would not have become tangled up in a flimsy net.

I suspect that my father, years ago, might not have used row covers in a suburban garden that was visible to neighbors. “How unsightly!” he might have thought. But that was then. Gardening is a balancing act and row covers are part of the landscape, an elegantly efficient part in fact.

Row covers protect seedlings and small, low-to-the-ground plants from intruders of all shapes and sizes, they can extend the growing season and they prevent possible intruders from getting hurt. They also save money. Install once; no need for refills!

As I think back on the view of my garden from a second floor window, years ago, I imagine how it would have looked with a few row covers. Frankly, I find the linear, rounded tunnels add perspective to the garden. And we could have planted an entire, uncovered section just for the birds.