CSHunter802
Buck Fawn
This spring we will be planting around 200 Norway spruce trees (14" bareroots) to screen off a long section of road that borders our property. The trees should arrive in the first week of April and we are planning on planting them as soon as weather permits. We have a properly sized auger on our tractor and a crew of 4 guys so the work won't be too bad.
The stretch we are screening is not wide open so we are spacing the trees for long term coverage, (My brother and I are in our early 20s so we should reap the benefits of this screen for many years).
Currently we have no plan to cage the trees. For context, we do not have a high DPSM here, but in our area and on our property we have a much higher DPSM than the rest of the state. We are probably wintering ~10 deer on our 150 acres this year. At the time of posting they haven't come close to finishing the 2 acres of beans that we have on the property (they were fenced until the first week of November), the 3-4 acres of Brassicas have been mostly demolished. I am looking for thoughts on caging, are we making a mistake by not planning to cage? If we absolutely should protect these trees what is the most economical way to go about it for a planting of this size? We protect all our fruit trees with 4' welded wire or mesh, 3 t posts, and rodent netting around the base but even a scaled down version of this for the spruce feels like a huge undertaking.
Also this is my first time posting on this forum but I am a long time reader, I've been studying these threads and threads on the old QDM forum since I was 13 years old and have learned so much over the years.
The stretch we are screening is not wide open so we are spacing the trees for long term coverage, (My brother and I are in our early 20s so we should reap the benefits of this screen for many years).
Currently we have no plan to cage the trees. For context, we do not have a high DPSM here, but in our area and on our property we have a much higher DPSM than the rest of the state. We are probably wintering ~10 deer on our 150 acres this year. At the time of posting they haven't come close to finishing the 2 acres of beans that we have on the property (they were fenced until the first week of November), the 3-4 acres of Brassicas have been mostly demolished. I am looking for thoughts on caging, are we making a mistake by not planning to cage? If we absolutely should protect these trees what is the most economical way to go about it for a planting of this size? We protect all our fruit trees with 4' welded wire or mesh, 3 t posts, and rodent netting around the base but even a scaled down version of this for the spruce feels like a huge undertaking.
Also this is my first time posting on this forum but I am a long time reader, I've been studying these threads and threads on the old QDM forum since I was 13 years old and have learned so much over the years.
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