I don’t use it to protect my trees, just the gardens. I’m not brave enough to trust my trees to it, I use circular fencing for that.
Once I saw with my own eyes a deer jump through a fishline fence I had put lines only 6" apart on. They aimed between two lines with their hooves. After that I gave up on fishline. My fence was in the open, if its a smaller area without a clear takeoff and landing spot on either side they may be less brave.
This year its plastic deer fencing all the way, my veggie garden has a high fence all the way around it now. 7.5’ high fence, around a buck a foot.
For 2 years my wife had Daylilies eaten by deer repeatedly. Then we put up a single strand of the cheapest/thinnest/most-invisible’st fishing line we could get, at about knee high. Knock on wood, they’ve been fine for maybe 4 years since. Around fruit trees I put 2 strands, knee and just below shoulder high. They did get broken a few times and some trees were nibbled on. She once saw what appeared to be a 10-point buck grazing on grass heading towards the trees, until he bumped the string, backed up and moved down the hill a bit… Repeat maybe 3 more times. Until he reached the corner of the “fencing” and grazed on past below the trees. The number of times it was broken and nibbling happened, prompted me to put up an electric fence though. I still feel it could at least be of secondary value though. My electric fence is unfortunately not 8’ high.
Three trees attacked… in order, My pear tree (Bartlett), my methley plum, and my regina cherry. The methley seems to have survived. The other two are dead
… next time i have to put fences around them on time. I planted them and only put fences on after a week. Lesson learned.
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All my fruit trees looked like this last year. I chopped them off below the damage and all but the plum have come back this year. Just saying there could be some hope for them.
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My cherry did some major healing but the exposed heartwood is going to hurt it in the long run. The tree also simply looks terrible. On a good note this should be the first year with blooms on all of the branches. I will finaly get to taste more then 2 berries.
Flavor Supreme got set back 2 years and my Dapple Dandy died after last year
Not the dears fault but I ripped my flavor grenade graft right off the tree. I taped and glued it back on and its holding in there.
