This year my peach tree from a seed had its 3rd year of bearing fruit i was expecting to get 100s of peaches but the squirles and birds ate every last one long before they where ripe. Does anyone have any suggestions to prevent this happening in the future
Netting and bagging
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That would probobly work but the tree is like 20 feet tall and see its not fesiable unless i wanted to cut it way back
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Hi Aryeh. Welcome.
Your problem is definitely not new to backyard fruit growers. Backyard growers (and farmers) have been battling varmints since humans quit foraging for their food.
The good news is that, since this competion has been going on for so long, there are some options.
One is netting, as mentioned earlier. I understand your problem that your peach tree is too tall. Most people do cut their peach trees way back (to what we call pedestrian height) so that fruit can be picked from the ground.
Your peach tree is still young enough, it can probably be cut back severely so that you can get a net over it. Sometimes squirrels will chew through a net, but most of the time proper netting discourages most of the theft. Currently the best netting I know of is sold by American Nettings. You will need to make sure the netting is tightly secured around the base of the tree.
Another reason for pruning the peach tree lower is that it’s easier to thin the fruit. Peach fruit should be thinned at about thumb nail size so that the remaining fruit will have more of the tree’s energy to grow bigger and sweeter fruit.
One does loose some peach production early on, but that’s fairly short term. In the long run peach production is just as good (generally better) when peach trees are trained to a pedestrian height.
Here some video footage of my orchard I posted a month or two ago. The peach trees aren’t pruned well (I had an employee who had a learning disability pruning for me, and he couldn’t quite understand how to prune regardless of how many hours I worked with him). But the point of the video is that you can see the peach trees are pedestrian height (mostly). The video is poor quality and there is no sound in the video.
Here is a better quality video of me pruning a young peach tree. I’ve posted this one many times.
Another option may be to leave your peach tree tall, and cut off all the scaffolds below 5’ from the ground. Then you can wrap tree with metal flashing (using staples to staple it to the tree). If done correctly (start with the flashing on the bottom and work up, so there is no flashing lip for the squirrels to grab and climb) then it can prevent squirrels from climbing the tree and stealing the fruit. I’ve used this technique with a pecan tree before. However, it only works if there are no low hanging branches (squirrels can jump about 40" from the ground) and there are no trees close by in which squirrels can launch from and land in your peach tree.
Tall peach trees do require ladders to thin fruitlets and pick fruit, but some members elect this route.
Most members on the forum simply trap or shoot squirrels. There are lots of live traps available, which are not harmful in case a small pet (like a cat) gets captured in the trap. You simply release the cat.
It’s not advisable to release wildlife (in many states it’s actually against the law) as it has the potential for transporting disease, and it simply dumps your problem on someone else. Most people simply destroy the squirrels by throwing the trap in a barrel of water. The squirrels drown very quickly.
I recommend this live trap (much better than Havahart).
Several members on the forum use the squirrelinator trap. They also sell a basin for destroying the squirrels.
There are also lethal traps (i.e. tube traps and A10 squirrel traps) which kill the squirrel instantly, if you are squeamish about drowning a squirrel.
There are lots of threads on the forum about trapping squirrels.
Some people shoot squirrels with a pellet gun, but that takes a lot of hunting and more time than trapping.
Anyway there are some options for you. Hope that helps.
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I keep squirrels out by using a fence. I have 2 ft of chicken wire then hot E-fence above. The first hot wire is just 2 inches above the chicken wire. The rest are spaced for deer and raccoons.
I know it works. I have many squirrels at our bird feeder just 20 ft away
Fence is on a timer.
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A friend of mine lives a street over and his peach tree he’s never eaten a peach due to the squirrels also. I’ve never had a squirrel eat one luckily, but his tree butts up to his fence so it’s an easy access point. I gave him a bunch of bags to protect his peaches and they chewed through every single bag. I think traps or shooting is the only real option for squirrels.
Netting usually helps. Make sure all the net is around the tree and there are no gaps with covering them. The animals ALWAYS seem to find the places the netting has gaps in it.
My trees are big too. I use two foot metal flashing up a couple feet off the ground. It works great on everything climbing the tree (tree rats, raccoon, possum, ect). Birds will still peck on some of them, but it’s the climbing critters that do the most damage. Deer I stopped just by keeping the branches out of their reach.
The Kania 2000 trap for squirrels. See which tree the squirrels like to run up, then hang trap on trunk, bait with cashews.
It is strange that I have been answering this question on this forum for years and even provided photos of the “baffles” I install in the scores of orchards I manage, but even leaders here do not mention my methods or experience when the question comes up. I guess we are all mostly focused on our own anecdotes. My experience far exceeds most here because I manage so many orchards and my solutions have to be time and cost affective in a pretty big scale. Hundreds of these baffles must go up within about 2 weeks, starting 2 weeks after petal fall because squirrels will take small green peaches here, most years, most sites.
Nets work at some sites, some years, but squirrels are perfectly capable of gnawing through them the moment their hunger cannot be appeased by more convenient food. I only use nets for protection against birds.
People have created different types of baffles to protect crops from squirrels and coons and in my rather wide experience they are by far the best method to use if you are not willing to install an electric fence specifically designed for the purpose. I now train all my nursery trees with a long trunk devoid of scaffolds for at least the first 4’ so I can install these. I also paint them with a grease and oil blend and it is 100% affective in defending fruit from the ground. The only caveat is that the height squirrels will leap to reach a branch varies from site to site. Usually 5’ is adequate but not always. .
This tree had branches too low and squirrels that do jump 6’ where it is. It’s easier to baffle a tree with more trunk before branches and you can use a straight cylinder made of aluminum roofing coil and stapled to the trunk.
This tree has higher branches. We need to be very careful not to use too much oil grease mixture when the baffle doesn’t go all the way to the ground, or hot days may cause the mix to flow to and injure the trunk. I’ve killed plum trees this way, but only injured peach. If there is enough straight trunk, the cone shape isn’t necessary.
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I should have given Robert credit for describing my method. Not that he didn’t invent it independently. It took me many years and many lost customers to figure out the best way to do this. The internet makes things so much easier. I am very grateful for all the useful and free info it now provides and I’ll never take it for granted.
Now Lowes and Home Depot will deliver the coil for free. I use the brown axle grease in my mixture and not red becuase it looks so much better. If the oil and grease are well blended the oil is less likely to run in high temps.
The baffles are built from the lowest piece up and we use more rigid and expensive pre-painted coil for the first and sometime the second piece. For the cone part we use cheaper and thinner 20" wide coil (instead of the pre-painted 24"). We spray paint that because they are usually part of million dollar plus landscapes.
We remove the baffles at harvest to reduce damage and to avoid providing vole (mouse) nests where they overwinter and eat bark.
This year I discovered that a lithium battery powered stapler is the ticket. I bought a Ryobi, but I don’t know what one is most powerful or best. More power makes the job a lot easier and quicker.
That method is basically useless for most home orchards. Any squirrel could jump from the ground to all my peach branches. Big difference between a commercial orchard and a backyard grower. Also something nearby they could jump from, these baffles simply don’t work for most of us. Glad they work for you, but when my branches start at 18” off the ground they do nothing for me and likely all reading this thread or threads like it over the years.
I manage hundreds of peach trees in personal orchards of rich people and am not engaged in commercial fruit production.
Not all home growers need protect their trees from squirrels. The best protection comes from a good dog.
If the baffle isn’t working for you the problem is how the tree was trained. Peaches grow fast, so even if one can’t be retrained, it may be worth it to start with a new tree. I spend many hours trapping and shooting squirrels on my own property because my 3 acres isn’t enough space for me to have my nursery operation and adequate space between trees to stop squirrels from jumping form tree to tree- so yeah, if you are using every square foot of you land for tightly spaced trees it may not work for you.
Stop what? Most of us don’t start our scaffold branches at 6’ in height. My lowest branches are well below a squirrels jump height, as most of us prefer fruit all within arms reach from the ground. This 20ft tall peach tree does not apply, but if you saw @Olpea video, his trees are shaped like mine and most backyard growers I’m aware of. Which simply wouldn’t accommodate a system like you talk about. Not because I couldn’t put one on my tree, but that it would be a waste of time, since they could just jump from the ground to the branch. I agree a dog is a good preventative, still less effective than a gun or trap.
I see you edited your post while I was writing mine which makes mine make less sense now…. I also have no squirrel predation.
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Maybe you have time to reset traps day after day or repeatedly shooting animals, but don’t assume that your situation is identical to most who are here. I edited my comment, by the way. My first response was fueled by your dismissal of my method as being worthless. As if you had paid me for advice and couldn’t get your money back. 
Peace. We are all fruit growing siblings.
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This is pretty common across the northeast and Midwest where deer pressure is super high.
Your point about small suburban yards is well taken but the idea that this is totally infeasible for “most” growers is pretty silly.
@Phlogopite didnt say most, said backyard growers, which I assume most in the threads apply with lower scaffolding. I don’t think people are worried about deer predation on their peach trees is because they are climbing their 20feet tall peach trees. It goes without saying they are small trees. I would also imagine most people on this site grow a lower scaffolding peach tree, but I could be wrong with that estimation.
Wasn’t dismissing it in the case your speaking of, was simply saying it couldn’t work on any of my fruit trees, as I keep them short. It was (perhaps incorrectly) assumed that most people (<50%) on the site also keep their trees short. I’m sure that baffle system works well, on tall trees.
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Unfortunately there is no place in my yard that squirrels can’t drop from something to get in baffled trees. I have found that I can only get fruit from my fig, lemon, and Meiwa kumquat tree trees here in 6b Cincinnati.
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Here at my property I am fortunate. I believe on of the best solutions is to plant fruit trees out in the open and away from the woods. The squirrels here to not like to cross open ground to get to the fruit trees. Too many hawks around.
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