We harvest a lot of fruits like apples and pears, but most of the trees are a lot taller than we are and we didn't want to fork over the money for fruit pickers. My husband did some research and found some good ways to DIY.
There are many different ways to make them. Here are the best ones we've found.
If you like the wire cage version, you can just
buy the head on Amazon (affiliate link) for about $10 and stick it on the handle of your choice.
A similar version is the
pop bottle picker. It's very easy to make and assemble.
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You can make a
small fruit picker from a piece of PVC pipe, cut and shaped. This takes some skill and the proper tools.
Some people like the
hoop and bag style, with a bag for collecting as much fruit as possible before you have to bring it down.
We decided to make the pop bottle picker, because it was free and simple. Our son is holding our first two pickers in the picture below.
We used 24 ounce bottles and mine had an old broom handle and duct tape holding it all together. My son's used a piece of bamboo for the handle, and his was just as successful. We've used them to pick apples, crab apples, plums, pears, and hawthorns with no signs of it working loose. Today there were some pears that were still out of reach, so we lashed the two sticks together and kept on going. It worked great. It's not quite big enough for larger apples, but all we need for those is a 1.5 liter bottle. Cut it and tape it on, and we're good to go.
If the fruit seems to be consistently out of reach, you may want a
telescoping handle (affiliate link). We have one that came with a broom, and it extends out to about 10' long. With my husband's and oldest son's height, that's about 18' of wild fruit we can reach (less for me and the younger kids).
We now have a bunch of these and we make quick work of fruit trees with the kids.
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