Dealing with animal problems

The deeper you live in the country the more animals will be attracted to the succulent delights of the leaves and fruits of your orchard.

In my experience birds are enemy of summer while rabbits are the bane of winter. Rabbits are by far the most dangerous because if they are left unchecked they can eradicate your entire orchard in a single winter. During lean times rabbits will quickly turn to eating the soft succulent bark of fruit trees. Rabbits can quickly eat all of the bark off the tree in a ring, called girdling. Fruit trees transfer most of their water and nutrients through the soft layers just under the bark. When a girdled tree comes out of dormancy in the spring the roots will be unable to send enough key nutrients to the burgeoning foliage and the tree will die.

The cheap option is to buy simple tree wrap to bind the trunk in the fall before the first snows. For a slightly larger investment you can buy little white plastic sleeves that fit over the trunks, which can be reused for another 2 or 3 years.

I have used both of these options before and they have kept my trees safe during two back to back mild winters. Then just as I was getting confident they would keep me safe from the winter rabbit onslaught, we were hit with a harsh winter. The available forage base was less and the deep freeze lasted longer. This drove the rabbits into such desperation that they kept chewing away with their ever-growing teeth until they made it through the protective layers and feasted.

While hunting the rabbits out is indeed an option, you would need to be a crack shot who loves to chow down on rabbits daily to be able to cull out a large population like mine. While Jack my resident barn cat certainly does his share to thin out the herd, the best offense is still a good defense.

My favorite Aegis shield is to turn to black corrugated plastic tubing. This is usually available in 4 or 6 inch diameter and is sold in the plumbing section of the hardware store for use as a cheap outdoor drain pipe. This stuff is so tough you have to cut it with the metal blade of a reciprocating saw. I cut it off specific for each tree in sections that cover from the ground level to the bottom of the lowest branch.  The last thing you want to do is short yourself only to find the rabbits run across the snow drifts to girdle the bark just above the top of tubing.

Once I have the custom length cut I make a slice down the entire length of the tube. Then I peel it open on that seam, slip it around the trunk and tie it tight again with stove pipe wire. I will be honest with you, the first couple of times you peel this tube open will be a terrible pain. This is the sort of thing where you should get a good night sleep the night before, eat a can of spinach and wear thick leather gloves.

Once I have the corrugated pipe wrapped around the trunk I tie it shut with stove pipe wire. The added advantage of choosing a black corrugated pipe is that when the sun begins to strengthen in the late winter the pipe heats up and melts some of the surrounding snow. Since fruit trees tend to build up drifts around them, this added little bit of melt can thwart rabbits that try to use the drifts as a staircase to the upper branches.

Most berry eating birds migrate south for the winter, so they really are only a problem in the summer. Many birds are attracted to the color red. This means they have a nasty tendency for completely ignoring your berry patch or cherry tree while the fruit is green. Then an instant after the fruit ripens they strike like well trained assassins. I literally had a sour cherry tree picked clean by black birds in the two hours I spent running to town to buy bird deterrents!

On paper the best way to stop birds is to use bird netting. In reality, once a bird has figured out there is food under or inside the netting they will keep trying to infiltrate it. This usually results in either the netting getting damaged, the tree getting damaged or both. The worstcase scenario I’ve ever had was the time three black birds found their way under the netting for a 50 foot row of strawberries and then couldn’t find their way out. They spent the better part of two days eating berries and thrashing away at the net damaging plants and runners alike.

The best results I have found against bird damage combines netting with something reflective. Before I cover the tree or row of berries with the netting I first decorate it with reflective fire tape and hang old CD’s from the branches. The flashing of reflective light teased by the wind replicates, in the bird’s mind, the light given by fire. This holds them back at first and even if they do build up the courage to test the net, they tend to be skittish and give up early.

Another, less practical approach is to plant an alternative for the birds to eat that ripens around the same time. For instance elderberries and cherries tend to ripen at the same time. The birds will initially be attracted to the elderberries, which when eaten raw causes mild stomach upset. Eventually they give up on the area altogether. While I’m personally not a fan of this method, I have seen people use it effectively.

Deer can be a serious problem in rural locations depending on the amount of forage there is available. Many of the horror stories you hear about deer decimating gardens and fruit trees comes from people living at the edge of the suburbs where the animals are pressured for available habitat and forage. In rural areas or outer suburbs where the population of animals doesn’t exceed the forage base, they might not need more than gentle dissuasion.

While the knee jerk reaction to stopping deer is often to erect a very high fence, this usually leads to a lot of frustration when a desperate deer decides to keep trying until it knocks a section of the fence down. The better alternative is to use two 4 foot high fences spaced 6 feet apart. Deer will be afraid to try to jump the fence for fear of getting caught in between. Growing brambles such as raspberries or black berries in the void between the two fences is a nice bit of added insurance.

There are also many old wives tales about deer being afraid of the scented soaps hung in the wind or liberally sprinkling cayenne pepper in the area. In my personal experience these do work for a short time. Unfortunately every time it rains the soap becomes useless and actually slowly can change the pH of your soil if overdone.

The cayenne pepper tends to have a lifespan of 3 to 4 days, so this means in the course of a summer you’re going through buckets of the stuff. Not to mention it has a knack for getting in your nose making you sneeze wildly. Over the course of a year it just ends up being too much work, pain and misery for my liking.

What I have found works best for a scent deterrent is to grow rosemary. Deer despise the scent of rosemary!  The closest I have ever had one come to a rosemary plant is 10 feet. The one hang up is that it needs to be a mature rosemary bush and not just some little sprig of a plant you bought at the local nursery last week.

If you live in growing zone 7 or warmer, rosemary will live year round in your soil. If you live in growing zone 6 or colder I personally advocate planting rosemary in a container, such as a 5 gallon bucket or planter. The rosemary can then live the entire season in the field near the tree you want to defend. In fall after the tree has been harvested you can bring the rosemary indoors to grow in a sunny window. Or you can keep it in the barn or garage, to go dormant. You just need to make sure the location you over winter it in does not go below 32 degrees for a long stretch of time.