Have any of you experimented with planting thorny things like raspberries or gooseberries under your fruit trees? My peaches and pears are constantly stolen by groundhogs before they ripen, and I’m wondering if this might reduce that.
I have never personally attempted that but I will tell you that rabbits and deer don’t seem to be bothered enough by thorns to not eat my thorny plants.
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In my experience, dense thorny plants can deter deer, but can also provide cover for rodents, which can increase rodent activity in an area.
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Not thorny enough!
Try Sea Buckthorn (Sea Berry), Siberian Pea Shrub, or maybe some Cornel blackberries, I forgot the name of them, giant berries and giant thorns, and once established they’re apparently good with being cut back yearly, although that doesn’t make sense to me they need to be cut every other year, I thought.
Here’s my attempts to protect the roots of my persimmon tree from the woodchucks who’s den I dug into while planting it. It’s very thorny, hillside Hawthorn, packed all around the hole, with the bases of the branches evenly spaced and sticking above ground. There’s no casually digging through that!
She seems to be a happy camper, although I don’t have new pics from my father yet. An American persimmon that gives wonderful and relatively large fruit even without a pollinator.
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As many thorns it would take to deter critters, it would be a bigger challenge for you to manage your trees. Electric net fencing is the way to go. Put some foil with peanut butter on the fence to train the critters to respect it. Its tough for me to appreciate thorns when we have a farm with way too many thorny plants. Osage, honey locust, black locust, multiflora rose, blackberries(fruit is mediocre), even the callery pear spurs are almost thornlike. I also live in a zone where these plants grow insanely fast and take over quickly…I would not wish this many thorns on anyone.
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I hear you @treefrogtim! Callery pear thorns can be crazy! While Bradford is thornless, most of it’s cruises are thorny and the thorns are particular rot resistant and are notorious for puncturing tractor tires…not so much as honey locust though; and speaking of honey locust, have you heard about the thornless honey locust?
Thornless honey locust apparently has a dominant thornless gene, so especially if you get a grafted thornless honey locust and start grafting that around your property, it should start spreading the thornless genes for you children and their children, plus you can cut and graft your medium and small trees over to the thornless.
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Yes I have scion for thornless honeylocust cultivars, but grafting an extremely thorny tree is no fun. I do plan on grafting some, but only to get them growing on their own roots.
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Sea buckthorn is brutally effective for keeping things out, the thorns are almost comically aggressive. I planted one on a boundary and nothing goes near that corner of the garden anymore, including me half the time. Worth it for the berries though.
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Anyone who touches my BET rootstock and read this first cant complain Pyrus betulifolia aka BET rootstock for pears, the downside is the upside
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What makes you think that’s not Callery? I know Betulafolia’s leaves are really varied, but I don’t see anything that’s very bet looking and those thorns look like Callery to me. Here’s a BET rootstock shoot off my parents’ Korean Giant, and its leaves on a higher shoot.
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When you have looked at as many thousands as I have you know the difference
These are bet
These are callery
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So is this not betulafolia?
Or is there that much variation in the leaves?
Maybe yours are betulafolia crosses? and that’s why they don’t have leaves that look like silver birch as the name suggests? (Silver birch is common in China where betulafolia also is wild, thus the idea of Birch-leaf but frilly like silver birch)
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That is definately BET in the photo. There is some variation. I do have crosses of the 2 also
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Squirrels were in my raspberries again this am. Thorny or not, I think fruiting items under your fruit tree would just bring more critters.
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