My little first year apple grafts were doing quite well, and had put on about 2 ft of growth over the summer. My yard is enclosed with deer fence, and all was going well. I guess with autumn, the damned rabbits got extra hungry (possibly it was rats?), got into the garden somehow,and gnawed half my baby trees down to little stumps. They left maybe a 1/2 inch to an inch of scion above the rootstock.
Is there any hope, if I carefully cage/fence the stumps, that my wee Spartans and Fujis could recover? Or do I just go scion shopping this winter and start over?
I agree with @toad. As long as there is any scion wood left, there is an excellent chance of pushing new growth from above the graft. Just make sure that the growth is above the graft before you nurture and baby a beautiful rootstock tree!
I live on Vancouver Island, so we don’t get much snow, plus, at the moment, my cages are about 10 inches taller than the stumps!
So I’ll keep an eye on them, and I suppose worst case scenario if they chewed off all the scion wood, I ought to end up with some new rootstock to graft to in spring 2027!
In N Az at 6000 ft. We have lots of rabbits and rats. Make your cages of hardware cloth. 1/4 inch. And close off the top. I use 24 inch width.
Also build some chipper dipper rat and mouse traps out of 5 gallon buckets. A couple of feral cats can be helpful too.
I had a nice strawberry patch a few years back. In 3 days all the plants were stripped bare. The rats used the leaves for nests.
Jack rabbits will eat everything they can reach. All of my trees have at least a 24 inch high cage.
Just met a Minnesota master gardener who lives 5 blocks away yesterday. Here the deer fence is sold with 2 inch wide x 4 inch high mesh. You always surround your deer fence with chickenwire because baby rabbits can slip through that. I go 4 foot high on the chickenwire because our snow stays pretty compact, usually under 2 feet, and the rabbits can jump 2 feet.
Thanks for the input. I’ve made a wee fence to protect the treelets (that’s probably not a word, but it should be) growing along my north fence, and enclosed a couple blueberry shrubs in it too, in case they prove tempting to the varmints. For the cordons growing at the base on my pergola posts, I made tubes out of hardware cloth and put them over the apples. Will rejig in spring so there’s room for side shoots to emerge.
Fortunately, we get very little snow here in central Vancouver Island, and the rabbits in my area are the little brown guys, not the giant escaped house rabbits that have become endemic in much of the island. Hoping the owls, hawks and eagles do a little population control too!
Fingers crossed the nubs have enough healthy scion wood to restart in Spring.