When I was growing up, my dad had something like 14 fruit trees in the back yard, not counting nuts. There was an Italian prune plum tree, a Green Gage plum tree, a couple cherry trees, and several apple trees. My two favorite apple trees were the Northern Spy and the Cox's Orange Pippin.
Now that we're living in the middle of nowhere and have a little more room, I've been working on planting a small orchard of my own. We've planted a couple Italian prune plum trees, a couple Cox's Orange Pippin trees, and even a Green Gage plum tree. It's been very exciting.
I would have saved time and energy if I'd just have taken a couple of those trees, chopped them into small pieces, and left them out for the deer. They ravaged the Cox's Pippin tree we planted, reducing it to a bald stick with a few pathetic, broken branches. They ate most of the branches off the MacIntosh tree, leaving it sadly unbalanced. The Italian prune trees seem to have survived the best, but even they ended up with just a small handful of leaves. They looked like spindly skeletons.
Interestingly, the deer seem to have done almost as much damage in the spring as in the winter. The trees looked much better in March than in July.
So last fall, we planted a couple more trees, which we protected with "fences" made of hog panels. Those have fared better (so far). The Green Gage was by far the most mature tree we've planted, and the deer appear to have left it alone entirely. We planted a second Cox's Pippin and a cherry, both in wire fences. Both have been left alone.
To be fair, we've had a mild winter (so the deer haven't been desperate), and we now have a dog. I think the dog has had a bigger impact on deer raiding our trees than I have realized.
So now I realize I'm in a war of attrition with the deer. I'm going to have to plant trees in great enough quantities that I can afford to lose one or two to the deer. Most of the varieties I've been planting require at least two trees for fruit, so I've been budgeting at least three trees per variety. That means I can lose one to deer and still get fruit. And when deer season rolls around in the fall, I'll try to recoup some of my losses in venison.
So yesterday we planted a couple Northern Spy trees, and I have a couple more cherries to plant over the next few days. That brings the tally up to eleven trees total, but I want to get at least one more Green Gage and another Cox's Pippin before it gets too warm. I'm hoping to get the total fruit tree count up to 15 by fall.
I haven't given up on the trees the deer ravaged: we fenced them in and fertilized them and mulched them. I'm hoping they recover, but I also realize we've lost at least a year or two of productivity on them.
