As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
I neglected, no I forgot, being overloaded on information to address something a few days ago concerning wee baby apples, in deer wee nipping them off, or Daisy as she decided to do last year.
There are three primary problems for apple or fruit trees and they are deer, rabbits and voles. Voles will saddle the bark and kill the tree (You have to cut the tree off before it leafs out below the saddling to keep it alive.) Bunnies will saddle older trees too and deer will either browse the apple trees or polish their antlers on them.
The way to deal with the deer and bunnies is to get some concrete wire mesh. You make a hoop if you are rich enough to buy the stuff about as far across as you can reach, anchor it with a T post and you have yourself about the best protection available outside of a 270 for the deer or a 22 for the bunnies.
Voles are a big more, in you should wrap the tree, but they are the worst if you leave too tall of grass around your trees or yard. They live in that under the snow and eat your tree bark off.
So you can either put a black plastic sewer drain pipe around them, wrap them, or put a window scree around them about 5 inches across, as the remedy, and nothing in life is certain even with that.
Predators like garter snakes and cats help on the voles. You can always trap them for recreation too, but most people do not have that kind of time.
This year I had a bunny eat off a pine tree because we got a late snow and it was hungry. Same snow the deer came through the yard and I watched them nip the buds off my apple tree that God planted. Animals have to eat, but at least it was not the buck tearing the hell out of a Honeycrisp apple I planted one night outside of my window.
After the trees get their tough bark on them, they are pretty immune to problems, unless you live in elk country, and then they can tear the hell out of everything imaginable as they are big animals.
Spraying I should spray, but I do not as my trees are immune to blight and smut, but I do put a soda bottle (Neighbor used a whiskey bottle) to put in an apple maggot nectar of sugar, banana peel and water, which does kill those moths and keeps the worms out of your apples.
I know this year that Daisy and Belle did not get many apples as the deer ate all of them that fell of the tree. They did that at Bun's too where we were getting the Haralsons. That saves on the apple maggot problem too.
But it is best to just protect your trees as something will probably harm them otherwise. If you make sure they have water, and plant them right by loosening up the soil under the roots, they will get their tap root down and grow themselves in a few years out of most of their problems.
Do not in planting though do what TL's parental father did, in I still feel bad for those abused trees in he apparently in his soil, dumped a mulch soil around them of quality when he planted them. Those trees are like 10 years old an still look like chit. The roots never got into the surrounding soil is what I concluded due to being hemmed in by the good soil.
When you plant, just dig deep, loosen the soil, and replant with the same soil and if you need to, you can always fertilize on top and water it in. Most soils in America are well endowed by their Creator to grow anything, and in most cases do not need fertilizer. They just need to be planted right.
In my location we only have like 12 inches of good soil, and under that is clay sand. Does not matter as the nutrients are in that subsoil and things grow lovely in trees and bushes in that soil structure.
I do not complain too much about the animals eating things as they have to eat too, even when I try my best to protect the trees. It is nature and the reason most trees look like trees instead of bushes is deer and rabbits eat the bottom branches off. I have a host of plum suckers under the clothes line that I failed to cut off last fall as I was too busy here, and I have been watching a bunny tear the hell out of them going scorched earth, solving most of my problems there.
That is about it for the subject that I forgot to mention about previously on this addition of Cherry Crest, where Angela and Lance make wine as Chase and Maggie proceed unaware as Richard moves in for the sweet nectar of the vines.
You would have had to have watched a great deal of Thursday night CBS television to know what that was about. It better have been Thursday as the listings were Magnum PI, Simon and Simon and ........no I am not going to tell you as Ana Alicia kicked her shoe off at the dirty old man in the office she was about to commit adultery with and he caught it. That was just good directing.
Nothing to do with apples. Is just how my fertile mind works in several subjects going on tangent at once.
agtG
