Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Renovating a Pond or Lake? Mid winter dig

esshup,
I did use the white plastic protectors with some success, but even those get nailed periodically. I think the deer see them and think there is no bark left to be rubbed and move on, but ultimately are not as good as fencing to protect them.

If in a pinch, you can run steaks (not the meat) in a quadrant around the outside of the tree trunk so that the antlers don't fit. If they get hung up in branches and sticks, they wont bother. It is those bare 6 foot + trunks they cannot resist!

If you plant your trees in a mostly unmowed field full of mice or rabbits, it is also a good idea to put metal window screen slightly below soil level up the trunk a good 6 inches. It keeps mice from kicking back under the snow in a freshly dug bungalow with a supply of tree trunk food. Just don't tie it tight and girdle the tree, but spiral it on so it can expand when you forget to loosen it up mid-summer. Some fruit varieties really draw the critters in!

Another option perhaps....FWIW I started planting trees here at the new place in 2012 and have been using 5 foot tree tubes with good success. We have lots of deer and they haven't bothered any of the trees. The tubes I purchased were also advertised as making the trees grow faster and I think that claim is actually true for most variety of trees I've planted. For example, I now have 10 feet tall Catalpa trees, that I started as seed in my basement in April 2012. Also have 15 to 20 feet tall maples, sycamores and birch that were planted as little 8 inch seedlings in 2012.

On the flip side, our orchard is all semi-dwarf trees and the tubes are too tall for them as I think they inhibit the branch growth that low. The deer enjoyed browsing on them last spring. I think I'll try the wire ring idea this spring.

If it's just rubbing you are concerned with, a simple inexpensive fix I found is to loosely tie a 1/2" , 5' tall metal conduit to each side of the tree. Buy a 10' , cut it in half, gently push a half into the ground on each side of the tree and tie it in place. They only have to be in place a few months, during that season. Must be the metal is just too weird for them, never get a rubbed tree this way. I know all too well how opportunistic they are. Left one of my prized chestnuts unprotected... Just one night... And the $&@/ rubbed it bad. Five billion trees that size there...and they did my chestnut. The only reason I can come up with is that it smells different. "I'm the only buck on the mountain that smells like chestnut... I'm getting lucky for sure!" Only thing that makes any sense. Just got my seedling containers in today!!! Picked up peat moss, vermiculite and perlite for the potting mix on my way home. Will be spending this wintry evening sorting and starting the early risers of the 240 chestnuts I have in cold storage. I looked this morning, about 1/3 have germinated already.

Germinating Chinese chestnut getting ready to go in its grow pot. Will be 15-18" tall with leaves the size of a dollar bill by April. I started planting in April last year but will wait til late April/May this spring. The ones I put in later last year did better. I also need to be more careful to properly harden them off before establishing them. It was very cool having little green lives indoors last year in the dead of winter. Hope springs eternal!

Here is a link to an upstate (Ithaca) based nursery stock supplier a friend sent me this evening. I may try a few of their peach trees to see how they take.

http://shop.cumminsnursery.com/

FWIW if you are looking for a species that is hard to find or just want to browse, Reeseville Ridge Nursery has the most impressive species list I have ever seen by a long shot. Darrell Kromm is the owner and I have bought many trees from him. Great trees at great prices has been my experience.

Nice find on the Nursery!!! I love Ithaca, so it is an excuse to visit. Lots of beautiful places around there to hike.

I do have some peach, they do pretty well tough they are prone to bores and weaken unless you spray periodically. I don't like doing that if I can help it, so my peaches suffer.

I too have been working with full American Chestnuts here and there, but having terrible luck. They do NOT like my very basic (limestone) soil. The Chinese chestnuts and crosses do OK, but only the full Chinese seem to thrive. The only CC bearing nuts came with the house, and must be getting fertilized by a wild tree someplace that I have yet to discover. I won $200 for a large wild one several years ago I found, but it is nowhere near our house.

I have about 200 CC nuts naturally chilling in the front garden, but I think I may have dehydrated them by keeping them in a bucket too long. I got tired of eating them as they are not as tasty as the AC. They are probably crosses, so I may try getting a few to grow to replace the full AC that died.

The gentleman I won the finder award from works with a team working on making blight-proof AC varieties via genetic splicing. Back when I met with him, he assured me that it would be successful and there would be no problems introducing them into the wild. That all blew up last year when it was exposed to the anti-GMO crowd. My gosh that anti-GMO group is feisty! It is probably the most promising way to get AC back into the ecosystem though.

edit: This is the tree I found:

Squid, you're a chestnut guy too? No way!

Thanks guys, another link to add to the list!

In general I am a tree guy as landscaping architecture was my first career of choice, but my liver couldn't take the schooling. I got a little bored at it and decided I liked electrical engineering as it paid better and wasn't seasonal in NY. Then I could afford my own place and play on my land rather than working on other people's. Looking back it was a wise choice as I would have been a pretty lousy landscaper.

It is immensely frustrating being a tree guy. I have lost quite a few unusual specimens over the years due to trampling, eating, rubbing, drought, deep freezes, lightning, pests, etc. I had some pretty cool beech varieties until mice decided they were tasty, some interesting birch until drought, and now I am loosing my white pines and scotch pines to (I think) Sirex wood wasps. Inexplicable sudden deaths of otherwise healthy trees. I cut up and burned up a dead one this past weekend to eliminate larva. It was a big tree and my back is feeling the love...

Texas lost a lot of huge oaks due to drought. TPWD expects, even with our floods, to have dying post oaks for 10 years. Some on my land had to be a century old. What surprised me was losing a lot of cedars on a spring fed creek when the spring dried up.

DD1
We are loosing big oaks and hickories in alarming numbers, sure hope the worst is behind us

Pat, I think the root damage caused most of the die offs. And, the plentiful rains can't help a weakened root systems. I am still losing cedars of all sizes.

DD1
I blame the youpon draining all the nutrients and water from the soil. What is your thinking on the cause of the root damage?

I haven't lost any hardwoods, but this year I noticed random dead pines about 6" in diameter or thereabouts. They are no where near one another....just one or two on the east side and the same on the west side of the property...not a piece of bark left on them...not sure if it's some kind of blight or something....everything out at my place is in really good shape otherwise. Not sure what is going on.

Pine bark beetles maybe
At one time they were bad in east Texas

Pat,
I'll have to investigate further. I had planned on cutting them down and cutting them up to burn right after hunting season was over. Now, it rains every weekend. I may get with the TAM Forest Service. Those little rangers running around like that sort of stuff.

Pat, it was all caused by 5 years of drought. My almost 2 acre pond became about 1/4 acre of muddy water.

Seems no matter where in the country we live, there are major changes going on. We have an infestation of Emerald Ash Borers. Pretty much guaranteed devastation for any Ash tree locally. This three acre section was adjacent to the small orchard I established. It was 90 percent Ash. Decided instead of watching them finish dying then the whole section becoming a jungle of Sumac and briars to level the area and expand the orchard...

We are going to let our ash trees die slowly to provide wildlife habitat. They say a dead tree actually provides more habitat than a live one.

We are losing all the ash trees around our place. We now have more woodpeckers around than just about any other bird.
Up in NE Missouri where we are we had a pretty bad drought that ended last year. Still see a lot of dead dying oaks in the woods. Pretty sad, because it looks like it didn't have any effect in the maples. Pretty to look at, but useless for wildlife.

On my eighty plus acres there are plenty of areas where this will be the case. After establishing the small orchard it was incredible the draw it is to wildlife. The one thing I didn't have up there was open area where the nutrition is at ground level. I'm using clover and chicory as ground cover. Deer and turkeys are loving it. Different bird species are showing up and staying. This creates quite an increase to the edge habitat that wildlife thrives on. Right now it looks like hell on earth... But that will be temporary. Diversity, transition of different types of habitat... They seem drawn to that.

Dave, I've never seen so much unseasoned oak split, sitting on the roadsides, ready for sale. Lot's of trees still dying, and no slowdown in the foreseeable future.

Hollywood and others, thanks for a great turn on this thread. Very informative.

Hard maples are premium timber, so I assume you have soft maples.

Hollywood, your telling me the deer in NY eat chicory and clover up there , I use the same for ground cover around the pond. I do it for the deer, turkey, bees and to stop erosion on a hill At the pond. I have to water mine in the summer. Gets pretty hot and dry here in the summer. But not much snow, maybe an inch or so each year. And like others here, I have lost some big oaks and seeing the same in some of my Pine forest. I had a forestry guy out, my thinking was pine beetles, but nope, it was drought.

Tracy

You're telling me... You got hills?

Ha!

Heck, our button bucks would have to stoop down to look at your ten pointers...