Most all of us have had problems including myself with critters damaging or getting our fruit and it is very disappointing. I started bagging my fruit early on and that has mostly protected them from insects provided I get them on early enough (exception is plums). There is a lot of work installing the bags but the results are pretty good. The second issue I had was protecting the fruit from squirrels, birds, and raccoons, and opossums. For several years now I suffered a heavy loss of fruit as they ripened. I wasn’t sure when they were being eaten but after a few early morning walk through the orchard it was apparent that much of my loss was at night. This is my first full year with an electric wire that only comes on at night. I used a quick and easy install with only one wire about 4-8" high and it was installed about a month before any fruit started to ripen. Based on my research the one wire probably isn’t enough and I plan to improve this going forward. When some of the early ripening apples started to mature early one morning I found one apple about two feet outside the wire and I’m assuming that as the critter was exiting the one wire it must have got a sting from the wire and took off and didn’t return for the apple. I have a huge amount of gray squirrels and I have no idea why they didn’t attack the fruit but they didn’t. This is a long post and I don’t know if these methods will work every year but as of now I think that I only loss one apple. I counted 25 Goldrush apples hanging on the trees yesterday and if they make it I will have had a great year and I hope each of you did well also.
Good morning, Bill. I had very little damage to fruit on my apple (a few bird pecks) but squirrels hit my plums pretty hard and took most of my pears. I picked a lot of plums early to save them but they would have been better if I had left them on another week or two.
Deer have been really rough on the lower foliage. They hit my apple and plum pretty hard. Net or screen over my new grafts saved those, and I wrapped some fencing around the plums, but they still reached past it. I’m afraid I’m going to have to get serious about fencing, probably something with stock panels. It won’t be easy to make those look acceptable and be easy to get part for pruning, etc.
Auburn,
Our electric fence has a 16 inch tall wire fence at the bottom, with 5 hot wires above. the wire fence is to get above the tall grass/weeds.
If I was doing it again, I would use wire mesh to keep out squirrels. Now I have 2 inch by 4 inch. Also, use the fence up to 2 feet tall, weeds grow fast.
I was lucky, no critters made it in other than a few mice. Those I caught with mouse traps.
Insects; I kept up on a spray schedule and had zero hits.
now if I could control the late freezes…
Thankfully, my house and trees are surrounded by corn fields so no issues with squirrels. I do have huge issues with deer and raccoons at night. For deer I’ve tried everything under the sun and finally settled on putting wire mesh around the trunks and pruning off all branches less than 5 feet high.
The raccoons aren’t too bad on the apples so I usually let them have their share, but they will steal every single peach and leave me with nothing. I put a 3 layer electric fence around the peaches and that’s worked pretty well.