The animals are hungry

[chrysanthemum]

My husband and I had some unpleasant surprises yesterday when I was carrying water to some trees. The first was that our very small satsuma had been completely dug out of its planting spot, and most of its root system was destroyed. We replanted, but I don’t know that it will be able to survive the trauma. We’ve been in drought again, and because I do water the tree, the soil there is more tempting for a digging animal. We have a makeshift wrought iron fence up that keeps the deer from nibbling, but the spacing probably allows a small animal to get in. I think we’ll have to put a wire cage up. We think this time it might have been a skunk.

The next surprise was one of my olive trees. We have three planted on the south side of our property, and they are all surrounded by wire fencing. There are not posts driven into the ground because that’s a big deal, but there is one stake holding the fencing, and a circle of rocks holds it down at the ground. Yesterday I saw that one of my fences was completely gone, and the little olive (which had had to grow back completely from the roots after February’s freeze) had been stripped of almost all its leaves. My husband and I looked all around the area and found no sign of the cage, so we took a big one away from a bigger satsuma in the backyard which had been being eaten by deer jumping the back fence, and put it around the olive. Later in the afternoon when we were processing firewood, my husband was walking to a different part of the property to collect some downed cedar stems, and he found the mangled cage hidden in some tall growth.

We try to reserve Sundays for worship and rest, but we may need this afternoon to go out and see what we can do about putting cages around the two satsumas. At least it will be a pretty day today (60s and sunny) before the cold comes in later this week.

[macmex]

Wild pig or deer? I've heard of a buck getting a tomato cage stuck on its head and carrying it off. Pig would be all about rooting and digging in damp soil.

This is a hard thing and everyone's circumstances differ, so it's hard to make a suggestion for how to handle it.

Our livestock guardian dogs chase such animals away. But the also chase cars (bad).

George

[chrysanthemum]

Thankfully we have never seen a feral hog on our land, though we have seen them fairly close by. I think we can be pretty sure that it was a small digger that got the satsuma mandarin orange tree. Pardon the poor quality picture and the not so attractive surroundings, but here’s a picture that shows the fencing of where the tree used to be.  (This is a picture taken through the window of our house.  The tree was behind the front fence and surrounded by similar fence on all sides.)




That’s some heavy iron fencing that we found on the property and moved to that location to keep the deer away.  We have seen skunks, armadillos, and opossums in the area, and we still haven’t completely excluded all access under our shed.  At first we replanted the tree (if such a small remnant can be called a tree) in the same spot and set traps, but after looking at the forecast for the week, we dug it right back up and put it in a pot.  We are forecast for such strange weather (70 degrees to 19 degrees in two days) that we thought a traumatized plant might not survive even with protection.  We lost most of the tree last year, but one little branch was hanging on.  The whole thing got dug up, though, and most of the roots were severed, including the large taproot.  We’re hoping to give it some pampering inside so that it can possibly recover.





If it does survive, we eventually want to plant it back out.  We received a suggestion to cover the root zone area with hardware cloth or fencing, and I think we’ll look into that.  

The olive tree was probably a deer that put its head through the larger holes in the fence that was surrounding it.  We replaced it with some stronger smaller holed fencing yesterday.  I’ll try to get a photo later as it is (THANKFULLY) a little rainy right now.  Our big issue is securing the fencing as the land is so rocky that it’s very hard to drive anything into it.  

[chrysanthemum]

I sneaked out a bit ago to check on the olives and took a couple of photos. First the old-style fencing that remains up around our Mission olive (that regrew from roots after freezing even with protection in February).


Then the Koroneiki olive (also sprouted from roots) inside its new protection with smaller mesh fencing.  We think that a deer stuck its head through the large holes to eat the olive then got stuck and ripped the fencing up and carried it away before it got it off.  This fencing isn’t super secure yet because the ground is almost pure rock, but we’ll keep working on it.  I hope the smaller mesh will be more of a deterrent.  I had planned to replace it anyway because I want to use the larger holes for tomato cages, but since it had been working, I hadn’t done it yet.  The defoliated olive was my emergency to get me to act.







Finally, a bonus picture of what used to be a very large Satsuma Mandarin that came with our house.  It used to be a very full eighteen foot in diameter tree. It lost all its branches during February’s freeze, but thankfully with frost cloth and two poultry brooding lamps underneath, the trunk lived and resprouted.  Unfortunately, perhaps because there was more room in that back corner of the yard, the deer starting jumping the fence and eating the new growth.  We put up an inner fence around it to try to keep them out.





There’s still a lot of river rock in the enclosure.  Almost the whole back yard is covered with it, and we’ve gradually been pulling it away from the trunks of tree so that we can add organic matter and mulch.  I want to move this line way out, but it’s one of many ongoing projects around here.

[chrysanthemum]

Jan 31, 2022 4:47:47 GMT -6 @bon said:

Wow. You have such critter issues! I'd be inclined to give up. Not saying you should but I'm impatient!

It does get discouraging, but it also provides motivation to improve the setup, kind of like your bunny enclosure. Here's more motivation.




That was November of 2020. We were forecast for a very hard freeze so we picked all the oranges in one afternoon (whereas we would normally have left them on the tree longer). We had to open up a broken refrigerator to use as a root cellar in our garage. It was a blessing to have all those oranges and to have an abundance to give away. We'd like to see something like that again in future years.

[heavyhitterokra]

Those oranges are so beautiful!  I've never seen a citrus tree in my life that actually had any fruit on it.  That would so cool!

I have to put a cage around every tree that I plant around here because of deer. Though those are not the only pests that enjoy ruining my trees. I had a fig tree here once that the neighbor's dogs dug up so many times that it finally died. It seemed every time I put fresh soil in the hole, some stray dog would come along and dig it up just to see what I had buried there, even though it was only a fig tree.  I finally thought of burying a square of 2"x 4" wire fencing material around the base of the fig tree, but by that time it had already succumbed to root damage from having already been dug up one time too many. 

"Dang, that slow Arkansas thankin!" 

I've had some luck with using a 3/8" to 1/2" inch diameter rebar to stake out plants here. I cut several pieces of rebar about 18" inches long and welded a barb on one end, kind of like a giant tent stake. I used those to anchor my cages by driving them into the ground with a 3-pound brick hammer.

My wife has a yard swing with a shade cloth over it that used to end up tossed over after every thunderstorm, so I used some of the rebar 'tent stakes' to anchor that thing down too. It has never been moved by a storm since, though I pity the poor fool who has to pull those rebar stakes out of the ground if it ever does need to be moved someday.  Probably me).

[chrysanthemum]

I had never seen such a sight either until we moved here. Our first winter we hadn’t any idea what the tree was, and we left it entirely unprotected through temperatures down to the teens around New Year’s Day. Later in the month my in-laws came to visit, and when my at the time five year old was giving them a tour of the backyard, she discovered one lone mandarin orange hiding in the middle of the tree. That was the spring I tried to get rocks away from the trunk and use leaf mulch and compost to enrich the soil. It flowered that spring and gave us a huge load of oranges that winter. Because the load was so huge, it rested from blooming the next spring (satsumas tend to bear alternately), and again we had one lone orange which we gave to friends. We planted two more satsumas in hopes of getting them on to a complementary schedule with the established one, but we lost one entirely last February, and the other is the one that is in my plant ICU right now.

macmex ‘s photos of his mulberries with their little humidity dome have had me scrambling to come up with something. My bottles are too small, and I had a plastic bag that was okay but not great. I usually hang on to various packing materials, and I realized that I have a little collection of zippered bags in my closet that came with bedding and the like. I found a round one and have it over the convalescent satsuma right now.




I really need to move this off my dining room table, but I need to make room in our school/gardening room.  (We aren’t really using it for school other than storage these days, as we have our desks in the adjacent family room right in front of the woodstove.)

I’m hoping the freezing rain we had is insulating the bigger satsuma outside right now and that this small one will hang on enough to grow new roots.

Edited to add: The water bottle is upside down in a little terra cotta plant stake.  They belong to my next door neighbors, but they are letting me borrow it as I try to keep this little guy alive.  I’m not as good about watering indoor plants as I am about outdoor plants, so this “Plant Nanny” is like a mini olla system to help me out.

[heavyhitterokra]

Chrysanthemum,

This is a link to a website selling 5-gallon paint bucket liners. It's hard to tell from the photos if they are clear or partially opaque. If you place one of these upsidedown on a 5-gallon bucket the lips line up to create a dome that lets light get to your plants while keeping in moisture. You may need to cut a small opening in the top of the dome to allow some air circulation?

www.usplastic.com/catalog/item.aspx?itemid=27058&utm_campaign=SHG+|+Buckets+|+&+Drums+|+Smart&utm_source=google&utm_medium=PLA&gclid=Cj0KCQiAuvOPBhDXARIsAKzLQ8G6vdOp5XU3D9V_myzSr3OkbUP3XfLZ9_B1debRHNzcUtK5VrxHfKQaAuiVEALw_wcB

[chrysanthemum]

Thanks. I hope I’m set for now with my makeshift bag. I wonder if these would be good over top macmex ‘s new aeroponic buckets?

[heavyhitterokra]

I ordered a package of 5 of them last night, so when they come in I can take some to George (macmex) to experiment with.

It will probably take a week or so to get them in the mail, but we ought to find out fairly soon if they work the way I hope they do.

[chrysanthemum]

Keep us posted. If they’re translucent sort of like a vinegar bottle, I think that could be a really great humidity dome. Good thinking.

[chrysanthemum]

I wanted to update this thread with a photo that I took almost two weeks ago of the little tiny Satsuma Mandarin orange that got dug up last winter.  For the longest time it wasn’t doing anything except producing a sprout below the graft (no good), but just this month it has taken off.  We did pinch off the flower bud, but I’m so pleased that it’s growing again.



I’m also really glad that I didn’t put it back in the ground for this summer.  It’s easier to keep watered on my deck, and the drought has been so bad that we aren’t successfully keeping diggers out of the garden.  I have been having big holes, and I thought it must be another raccoon, but I’ve had several nights of digging where my marshmallows in the paths have been untouched.  It’s time to deploy the game camera again and see if that can give us a better idea of what it is and how it’s getting in.  (It took my fifteen gallons of compost to fill all the holes I found in my garden this morning.  Thankfully most of the plants were spared, but one cucumber had its roots pretty much completely exposed, and I had to harvest a few onions.). The area in front of our shed where we want to grow the orange tree is near the garden and has some old iron fencing against deer, but I know diggers would come in a heartbeat if I were watering something there.

[chrysanthemum]

The little orange tree is still growing!

[heavyhitterokra]

Keeping that little orange tree alive all this time was quite an accomplishment in that kind of weather. Kudos!