Hello everyone,
I have one peach tree and after three years I finally found a spray schedule that keeps the bugs from squandering them. I also got some nets from American Netting, but now that the peachers are nearly ripe, the squirrels are chewing thru the netting every day and stripping the tree. After 4 months of careful propagation, I’m down to only 5 peaches. Pretty discouraging.
Can anyone recommend how I can improve my protection for next year?
Thanks
I would try a baffle.
Trap and dispose of them.
I have fought legions of squirrels for decades. The only way I have found to control them is catch and kill. This is an ongoing process. I use tube traps baited with sunflower seeds. Best to start control early in the season before the fruit starts to get ripe. Otherwise they just go for the fruit. Here’s an example of the tube trap.
Start trapping and termination now, and do not stop. Ever. As you remove some, others will migrate in to take their place.
Tube trap, Squirrelinator, snares, Rat trap secured to an L-shaped board attached to tree trunk, Big Bucket(trashcan) o’ Death… all are tools that you can employ.
I agree with the above comments. It may seem harsh, but squirrels are greedy and relentless.
You might have some success with housing a good dog at the base of your tree. Our 2 cats, while good hunters, couldn’t keep the squirrel population down.
I’ve had squirrels strip two 25’ tall apricot trees of the entire crop two years in a row. Bushels of fruit wasted on the ground with the pits chewed out. That’s all they wanted- the pits! Stupid varmints! The second year they didn’t even wait for the apricots to ripen, they knocked down all the fruit while it was still green.
Tree is currently too low to the ground for a baffle to be effective.
You might try bubble-wrapping the remaining fruits (including the immediate branch area where the peach is attached). This disguises the fruit; I have had success protecting feijoa this way.
Agree with disposing of the squirrels. I used an air rifle with great success. Traps also work. Hated to do it, but loved gardening (successfully) more.
An electric fence with a tight wire fence for the first 2 feet, then hots close together. Only thing that worked for me.
You can’t kill them fast enough. I trapped so many raccoons and shot so many tree rats, made no difference. I work from home and my office window faces our mini orchard.
We have 10+ happy squirrels munching away under our bird feeder that is 15 feet away from our 3 peach trees. I do get a few bird pecks
Agree with suggestions to trap and kill. But as noted, you have to be relentless. Here I start in March and continue through November. Typical season is 60-80 squirrels. A mating pair produces two broods of up to 6 each per year. So even if you remove all squirrels from your immediate area, more will be pouring in soon from neighboring territory. Luckily the young ones are dumb and easily caught.
That’s not to say that an electric fence won’t work.
p.s. I pick a big crop of peaches with zero squirrel damage. The trees are not netted so I have bird damage from above and deer damage from below. But no losses from squirrels or raccoons, which get treated like the squirrels.
And yet I manage maybe 70 orchards that I baffle the peach trees for and my customers who used to lose to squirrels have enjoyed dependable harvests for the last 20 years.
If you think squirrels make a mess with your nets, let me introduce you to raccoons.
Trapping or shooting is an endless exercise- the only real payoff, if you factor in your time, is vengeance… and that’s worth something. Well, I do have customers who trap successfully enough to get fruit in non-epidemic years, but the reason they do that is because their trees aren’t properly trained for baffles.
I’ve been fighting squirrels for about 70 years and only felt sweet success when I began to baffle trees.
Nets are for the birds.
squirrel baffles
Do you just use ladders to pick from the trees? A tree tall enough for baffles seems like it would be out of reach for humans without a height assist of some kind.
What you need are some good hunting dogs.
Our dogs actually dig up the ground squirrels, and they tore apart an old dead fallen tree to get to one before.
They like eating the rabbits, but they don’t seem as fond of eating the ground squirrels but now we’ve got these two puppies that were abandoned, and the female pup ate a squirrel after the four of them relentlessly pursued it as a group effort.
The new pups also eat bugs off the ground, but they were starving so they’ve probably tried eating things they normally wouldn’t have.
All four of them together are a squirrel’s worst nightmare and they are wicked fast, our three-year-old female almost caught a big tree squirrel recently, but it got away at the last second.
The vet couldn’t believe how slow and strong her heartbeat is, our dogs get to run around all day so they’re in fantastic shape. Squirrel chasing is good exercise.
Even the new male puppy who looks like he got hit by a car and had it heal wrong, enjoys partaking in the squirrel chase, but he hops like a bunny a little in the rear.
And who doesn’t love the company of good dogs? They are one of God‘s best creations in my opinion.
After some deer came by and munched on our new trees, we started leaving them out at night with the GPS collar set to just around the perimeter of our garden.
We have had zero damage since then.
I am so grateful for these dogs.
For some reason I am unable to post the photos of my squirrel baffles on this topic. They are in this if you scroll down. Extreme Squirrel Problems - #45 by alan Someone else can do it, I’m sure.
I was wondering the same thing
So the feedback I’ve gotten is 1) trap and kill 2) baffles 3) electric fence and 4) dog.
I’m a bit attached to the lower branches on my trees so I’m not drawn to the idea of chopping off everything below 4/5 feet. But I’d be open to it after trying another method or two.
I’d like to learn more about how to set up an electric fence system. All my trees are pretty close to outlets so I see it as a possibility.
Our venerated @scottfsmith has recently found a novel and effective way to combat the squirrels.
Since @Audi_o_phile mentioned my new squirrel baffle method, I should add that you can protect trees with lower branches, by making a curtain of bird netting around the bottom of those branches. All you have to do is have bird netting in the way of anything close enough to the ground for them to jump up on. I have almost no low branches (removed due to deer pressure) but I have a couple questionable ones and it didn’t seem too hard to protect them. The main downside is you may need e.g. 10’x8’ instead of 4’x4’ to protect one tree… $1.50 instead of 30 cents.
The problem I had with plastic netting around trees is that the black racers (snakes) get stuck in them and die from sun stroke. The right squirrel trap mounted on the stem of the tree will do the job and may catch a possum, but nothing else.
