I’m seeking advice on how hobby fruit growers successfully protect stonefruit from animal harvesting. I’ve 50 young trees with perimiter deer fencing in Southern Oregon.
I’ve tried all sorts of nets, traps, fencing, reverse duct tape, tangle foot, all with insufficient sucess. In summer, the animals get very hungry.
I’ve game cam photos/videos of opossums, raccoons, fox, birds, squirrels, rats or mice and even a housecat, in andbaround the trees.
When it comes to to keeping animals out of fruit, your options involve exclusion methods, like netting, fencing, various guards etc., extermination methods like trapping and shooting, and deterrence methods like various sprays, repellents, noises, or guard dogs. The final option is capitulation, where you accept the animals will get your fruit, you just hope they will leave you something, which they may or may not do.
If you can figure out an effective means to do it, exclusion methods tend to be the most efficient. They can work very well. Extermination methods can work, but you might be shocked at just how many little fruit eaters you have to terminate for this to work. Lastly, with the exception of a good guard dog, most deterrence methods are just a waste of time IMHO unless you have very light pest pressure.
In your case, I would probably recommend working on better, stronger exclusion methods.
If you really want to keep them out hook up a 10 mile fencer on a strand of wire outside the perimeter. When the animal bumps into the fence they will get shocked and never go back. It can be solar powered if necessary. It will take care of the problem.
Have you determined which are your major fruit thieving culprits?
I’ve managed to keep out opossum and racoon with fence, but they weren’t my major problem. It was the squirrels! The other animals would take a few fruit or shake the tree and cause some drops. The racoons would take two bites of a fruit and throw the rest on the ground, then repeat 10 times. However, the squirrels were plucking whole fruits and running off into the woods. They’d remove everything from a giant tree in a couple days.
I definitely have less animal pressure on trees further from wooded areas of my property and on things I keep more mowed and manicured. I promise the wildlife has plenty of habitat at my house - they don’t need the area with the fruit trees or right next to my house. I’ve tried to make it inhospitable to wildlife.
A bunch of people are testing putting bird netting around tree limbs to prevent squirrels from climbing up them and it’s working for many. There are lots of other threads on squirrel deterrence but it’s a hard fight. I’ve considered adding a few strands of hot and ground wire tightly spaced and using a plug-in electric fence to deter squirrels, but that also means I need to make sure they can’t just jump in from a nearby tree or something and I’m not there yet.
I think my current culprit is a chipmunk but squirrels have been a problem in the past for me. I have scare kites on rods & reflective scares on the tree, only one bearing fruit this year, and those around it.
But im definitely missing a significant amount of fruit compared to 5 days ago. They are just gone. I found one unmared fruit near their usual haunt.
So now i sprayed a mix of deer/rabbit repellent, surround, capsicum oil, and nufilm. Working on the burning, stinking, hidden fruit angle.
I have had some luck deterring deer with Cayenne pepper tea. I get the Cayenne pepper at Sam’s Club. I expect it would have some utility with other predators.
Put about 3 tablespoons Cayenne pepper in a coffee filter arrangement. Pour about 12-14 oz. boiling water through it.
After it mostly cools, filter it again, just to be careful. Add a good squirt of dishwasher soap to the concoction. I use Dr. Bronner’s. I doubt it is really important to use the organic stuff. But maybe.
Put it in your sprayer and add maybe a gallon or a gallon and a half of plain water to it. Give it a few good shakes, pressurize and spray. Seems to be pretty persistent even after a couple of rainstorms.
I also add a tablespoon of of Potassium Phosphate to the mixture. Why not? Encourages bloom and fruiting, etc. kind of expensive, though.
I suspect that the Cayenne pepper is more troublesome to the deer than we know; like it makes it harder for them to smell predators and such. It seems to be more effective as the season wears on.
PS. If you have an enclosed yard and an orchard that justifies it, you might want to consider getting a coonhound with outdoor sleeping accommodation.
Coonhounds are driven with a capital”D.”
I recommend a Redtick as being relatively more tractable than say a Black and Tan.
I now have a TON of various sized snakes in my garden and yard to the point where you can’t walk around without seeing one. And now my animal pressure is finally down
I’ve laid down a bunch of black tarp and the snakes seem to love it and the heat it gives. Since then, I’ve had the squirrels disappear. The Robin’s disappear, the towhees at bay finally. Last but not least… no more chipmunks and rare to have bunnies in my yard now. All thanks to the snakes lol
I would almost be willing to live in an Indiana Jones movie if it got rid of the birds and squirrels. I had a ground hog two years ago, but haven’t had to deal with any of the others people mentioned.
Netting is the only thing that’s been close to reliable for me with stonefruit. Individual fruit bags work too but the time investment is brutal once you’re past a handful of trees. The electric fence suggestion is solid for ground-based animals, I’ve seen people have good results with a single strand at about 6 inches off the ground for raccoons. For squirrels though nothing short of full cage exclusion really stops them. They just figure out everything else eventually.
It would seem that my attempt to dissuade my thief only enticed whatever it is. Im down to 3 or 4 fruit left on the tree. Theres a fair amount of leaves and twigs on the ground so a squirrel seems less likely. Racoon, Possom, groundhog maybe? @mamuang did you ever figure out who the culprit was? My bite matks look very similar.
I still think it’s a gray squirrel. You see how the apples is being rotated while eaten? And he’s sitting on the branch eating it while dropping chunks below. It’s possible it’s a different kind of squirrel, but I think it has to be big to hold that apple up on the branch and eat it that well.
Racoons, at least when in families, don’t leave any trace, missing fruit, especially all at once is raccoons’ trademark.
I’m not sure the color of the squirrel but I agree with Trav they do that with hedge apples also. The way they are eating those is a dead giveaway its a tree rat rodent.
I looked back and the squirrels were primarily daylight thieves. However, they were very good at clearing an entire tree between when I looked at it one afternoon to the next day. They’re really athletic and will take the whole fruit and carry it off without a trace.
My most prominent night time operators were racoons and opossum. Neither was very good at stripping a tree the way a squirrel was. The raccoons though would shake the branches, fruit would drop. Then, they’d eat it off the core and leave the core.
The racoon would also sometimes eat a fruit while in the tree, but they actually had trouble with the peaches because the branches were too small to hold their weight. I have video of both opossum and racoon falling down trying to get at fruit on small branches.
I had good luck electrifying the wire mesh cages I use to keep deer from rubbing on them.
You need to start with the earliest to ripen fruits and once they get thumped they leave everything else alone for the season as they don’t want to get shocked and have no way of knowing which one are hot. They learn fast. It works pretty good.
My problem this year is I am always a day or two late. I bought an electric portable fence to put around my black ice plums and when I got there both trees were striped of all thier fruit. 100+ plums. My Lodi apples went from plenty of apples to zero in a day or two.
I think they are young raccoons. They always break branches when they are up in the tree. There is one less now.
2 Lodi apples from 3 trees, no cherries from 4 trees, no plums from 2 trees.
It’s pretty frustrating as they will eat them before they are ripe.
I’ll electrify my peach cages before they get them.
I’lluse wires like Clark to protect my tall spindle apples.
If you’re losing 100 fruit suddenly and you didn’t see a group of animals flocking to the tree, it’s probably not racoons. I have never seen them hoard or carry food off to store for later.
