The Easy Installation That Can Protect Your Fruit Trees This Winter

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If you live in a climate with cold winters, you know that outdoor conditions can be tough on both wildlife and plants. Food sources for animals become more scarce while trees and other plants are dormant and, in some cases, buried beneath layers of snow. Of course, if you live in bear country, you may want to skip planting fruit trees to avoid attracting them to your yard. Fruit trees may also be a reason why snakes are in your yard. 

In extreme situations, animals will resort to chewing on tree bark during winter, sometimes eating the buds, too. Deer, rabbits, and other mammals find the bark of young fruit trees particularly tasty. Mice can be surprisingly tough on fruit trees in winter, and they're capable of causing more damage than deer due to the way they chew an entire band of bark away near the ground, at times killing the tree in the process. With all of this in mind, it's important to protect those trees over winter. 

Installing a tree guard around the trunk just for the cold-weather months can help that tree keep its bark and thrive until it's old enough that its bark gets rougher and isn't as tasty to animals. A tree guard can be homemade, or you can purchase wrap-around tree guards that come in all sorts of materials and sizes. The right one depends upon the situation, as well as the age of the tree. 

Make your own tree guard from quarter-inch hardware cloth. For rabbits and mice, create a tube around the tree with it, keeping the tube 6 inches away from the tree, or farther. Bury the bottom end at least 2 to 3 inches into the soil to prevent animals from burrowing beneath it, and make sure the tube is at least 2 feet above the typical snow drift height in winter so rabbits and other small mammals can't reach above the mesh. If deer have been nibbling on the bark, make the ring around the tree wider and tall enough so a deer can't just stand next to the hardware cloth and still reach the tree trunk.

If you'd rather not cut the hardware cloth yourself, pre-made Metal Tree Trunk Protectors are available online or at local nurseries. These can also be stacked or secured next to one another for greater width, using zip ties, which are also useful to keep climbing plants in check. Another pre-made option that keeps critters from chewing tree bark is a vinyl spiral tree wrap, such as the Master Mark TreeMaster, which simply wraps around tree trunk to keep the bark from being accessible to animals. Metal flashing can be used in similar fashion; just use a height appropriate for the animals you're omitting from the area. Any opaque option should be removed in spring. 

If you have a series of fruit trees near one another, like your own personal orchard, an 8-foot-high fence around the group of them will ensure deer can't get to them. Even temporary fencing can work for the winter and is easily removed when the weather warms again.