Its been a fight like no other year this summer for me. I am guessing the mild winter made the populations extremely high and ratcheted up the pressure to the max. Its taking me too much time with sprinklers/repellants/traps and I’m still losing about half of my fruits. I have decided I don’t want to spend the next many years doing this.
So, I am making a new long-term plan.
First I plan to switch my trees to what I call umbrella training. I currently have a few trees which are doing well against the deer in this system - they are something like grape vines with the scaffolds not starting out until 5’ or so off the ground, the scaffolds are mostly horizontal, and all the fruit is packed in the 5.5’ - 7.5’ high zone. This system has the advantage of being prunable / pickable without a ladder, capable of being baffled for squirrel protection, and being out of deer range for the most part. The productivity is a bit lower but the density of fruit can be a lot higher in that zone. To do this on my existing trees I will need to remove many of the lower scaffolds, and do a lot of limb bending with the others.
Once I get all trees in the umbrella style I should be able to baffle all the trunks. This is going to be a lot of work since I have many trees, and I will probably cut back on my number of trunks for this reason.
@alan you are the baffling expert. It sounds like you use 3’ aluminum roofing coil starting 1 1/2 foot off the ground, stapled and then greased? Do you or anyone else have some pictures? I could be doing a whole lot of that next summer. Generally I think my trees are far enough from taller trees that the squirrels will not be able to jump down on them. But how far can squirrels jump horizontally? I may need to put up a few “walls” of flashing so all they could do is jump on it and slide off.
I’m not quite yet to 100.0% on proceeding on this, but I’m getting closer by the day…
I will take some pictures and see if my wife can help me get them from my Pixell phone to the forum. She says it’s a PIA with the design, but maybe I can get some photos this week- my son is visiting next weekend and he’s a professional coder so he should be able to handle it.
Thanks Alan. I more or less know how to do it but things always show up in pictures.
My deer continue to get less picky, they ate a lot of stuff I hit heavily with Plantskydd. I was out of town and I’m sure they noticed the reduced me-smell and more or less moved in for a continual feast.
Try adding some whipped eggs with the mix- let it get funky. Deer are extra hungry here as well but an app every 2-3 weeks of Skyd with eggs made stinky with age keeps them away from my unprotected nursery even though we have a young buck who thinks I run a petting zoo. I’d kill him if I had time to deal with the meat.
I can’t find the post now but someone posted a picture from a game camera showing a deer on hind legs easily reaching that height. Maybe they don’t do it often…but when tempted… Maybe something worth factoring in.
Strange that my deer have yet to develop great interest in fruit- they strip off the leaves and don’t bother eating the drops, let alone reaching. In the fall they usually will eat apple drops, but it has been quite a few years since they went after summer fruit. Now that I’ve posted this it will probably change.
Holy cow. I knew you posted this and was going to link back to it but couldn’t find it. Good warning to us all.
Love game cameras.
Funny, that it takes a certain talent to grow and nurture plants to production, BUT that does NO GOOD, if you don’t apprecaite how vulnerable they are, and to what they are vulnerable (thank you game camera) and take appropriate steps. And THAT is an entirely dif skill set, or mind set or whatever.
Here, they mostly eat the drops. I think they know they are the ripest. My neighbor said that he has seen them reaching on hind legs, but I have seen no evidence of it on my trees.
On another note, I have a deer this year that is consistently grazing the leaves and new shoots on my peach trees. I was angry because I started training my peach trees low (I don’t have squirrel problem and deer aren’t suppose to like peach leaves). I had to find extra time to put cages around all my young peaches that I’m trying to get trained. It hasn’t touched the mature trees so far.
It’s amazing that I see new problems every year since starting this venture about 15 years ago. I wonder what it will be next year.
@scottfsmith Scott- Would a perimeter electric fence be easier to install? A man at Kencove Fence in PA says he can design and supply a fence that will keep out both deer and squirrel.
I have no experience in training peach above the deer browse line, but for peaches 5.5’ to 7.5 may not be enough.
I say this because even though our peach trees are much lower, when they get loaded with fruit, they really bog down. Some of the scaffolds will occasionally touch the ground at the ends. Might be something to think about if you are thinking about higher fruit density in your 5.5’ to 7.5’ fruit zone.
I solved my problems by planting some trees in the pasture for the deer. They stay away from my trees as long as they have other food sources easier to get to.
I’ve had better luck with the rotten egg stuff this year, usually Plantskydd works as well but not this year. Or maybe it rained too much, it rained like crazy when we were out of town.
I have several trees pruned high like this and so far the deer have completely left them alone. The deer don’t get very big or smart here, they are under the wheel of a car before that usually.
It would be easier but in suburbia and little kids about its not an option I want to try.
That has been a particularly bad problem for many of my trees this year, many limbs are touching the ground. But the ones I trained to the umbrella model have very large nearly-horizontal limbs and even with bending down they are staying well above the deer. So, I know it can work but it may take a few years to get all my trees there.
I have a similar problem here in Mt. Mule Deer and Antelope not to mention hungry Robins. I live about 100 miles from my orchard and keeping the critters out isn’t easy. I had an electric fence around the property but when startled the Deer and Anteope just run through and break it. I was there two weeks ago and found that they pretty much stripped the leaves off my Chokecherry trees, the Elderberry bushes, and Blackberry Bushes. I do have some of the other bushes and Apple/Peach/Peach trees caged with woven wire fencing. I thought Rhubarb was deer proof but they trimmed it up better than a trained professional. I am going to follow Scott’s lead and start “umbrella training” my branches as well. We are in a severe drought here and there isn’t much greenery available for hungry stomachs. They were here before I moved in and I will share but this is getting ridiculous!
Bryan- How far apart are the hot wires on your fence? If too far apart I have read that the animal can stick its head through the fence before it gets shocked, then it bolts forward tearing the fence down. Same article says shorten up the space between wires so the animal touches the wire before its head is through the fence. Then, it says, animal will retreat. Plus baiting wire with peanut butter is supposed to help train them not to try to go through the fence.
I can confirm that. When I fist put my fence up with a hot wire at the top, I put that hot wire about 1’ above the top of the metal fence (ground for the electric fence), thinking that making it as high as possible was key. That did not work too well. What I saw was the deer learned to jump thru the 1’ gap. I suppose they got zapped every so often but it must have been worth it to them.
I ended up lowering that first electric wire to about a 7" gap, and adding a ground wire above that and a second electric wire above that. This combo has worked fairly well (although I did have to replace a couple of broken insulators when it first went up).
The instruction which came with my fence charger say that you need to bait or train the animal to the fence. With wild critters, easiest way is to fold a square of Al foil over the hot wire and put a smear of peanut butter on it. Deer, bear, whatever comes by and licks it and is now trained to the electric fence.
I use them both and ferment them together. My wife does complain on spray days, however. After a day the smell is there but bearable. In 3 you only notice it near the trees. The problem is that you don’t want to get it on anything you are going to eat in the next week or so. I figure once it is thoroughly dry it probably isn’t too dangerous, but I still wouldn’t trust eating it. I spray the growing shoots of my tomato plants carefully. The deer don’t like the tomatoes anyway.
