I don’t know if this will help, but . . . I got a very unwelcome visitor this year that I named Mr. Jerkofadeer Eatsmytrees, and I had to ad hoc a solution fast. My chain link fence was only six feet tall, and I didn’t have the money to get a bigger one.
So I grabbed some branches off some annoying weed trees I’d been trimming back, and tied them to the top of the fence using bark stripped off those same weed trees. (The bark on Siberian elm branches comes off in long, slippery, flexible strips. Those strips work pretty well to tie stuff to things in the garden.)
I angled those branches with the poky side out, spaced about a foot apart. I was hoping this would look like a very unfriendly fence for a deer to jump over, encouraging them to give my orchard a miss in the future. For the past few months, it seems to have worked! I’m hoping it will continue to. I thought I’d share that.
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Thanks for the reminder, but I’m not living there yet, so it isn’t easy to pop out there every so often to check. I’m just going to have to go with the stats I find online.
I know you can’t distil each location into a single number, but I think it is useful from a shorthand perspective to look at how much sun a spot would get when the obstacles at the horizon average X degrees high.
So, if the entire horizon had shade producing trees up to 10 degrees, from the perspective of the planting (I measured at about 4’ high for ease), then the spot will get 12.5 hours of sun on July 1st, dropping to 9.5 hours on October 1st. At the other extreme, 50 degree shading drops from 5.5 hours in July to none at all in October (at least unless the forest trees drop leaves first…).
When evaluating a site, I tried to look at the average angle for E and W. I only considered S if it was particularly high, as most of the time that won’t be the limiting factor. So, if it was 30-35 degrees to the East and 15 degrees to the West, I might consider it a 22 or 25.
This pic makes the backyard look pretty big, but regrettably, the best spot is about a 20. That’s still 9-11 hours during most of the growing season.
A large majority is in the 25-30 range (7-10 to 6-9 hours), which I think should be OK for most things. The bottom part (30 to 55 feet from the far end) is the worst in the 38-45 range. Once you get into this area, I think it is mostly for berries. Shading of 45 deg is 4.5-6.5 hours of sun, dropping to almost none in October or mid March (maybe delay honeyberry flowering?). So, I think currants and gooseberries are best for the 45’s and blackberries and raspberries for the 38-40.
Here’s my daughter on top of a woodchip pile
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