Apples,apples and more apples

[woodduck]

Tractor Supply's website has solar units from $100-$200.
Poly rope is more expensive that regular wire but it's lighter and you can space your T-posts a little farther appart and you don't have to support your corners if you dont want to. A better idea would be to make a round or oval enclosure so you could eliminate corners all together.

 

[Chainsaw]

What were you planning on using for fence? Deer jump over 5’ fence pretty easy.

Yes as you say they can jump a five ft. fence very easily but something about smallish enclosures they don’t seem to. I had planned on a top wire a ft. Higher with flagging tape to give them an illusion of a higher fence. The extra height on the posts would just be sticks tied or wired on to the posts.
Actually on the first row of trees I was thinking only one ft. from the fence as when individually fencing them most people have them 1 1/2 ft to 2 1/2 ft. From the fence. I thought the concrete wire like Sandbur used made sense. A few have even less. And yes no doubt some space would end up being unusable.

Since the wild trees here often grow with multi trunks ranging from two to six, some trees will be planted that way. It will take them longer to grow but their growth will reduce weed tree invasion into the thickets.

Thank you for the verification Rit on the calculations, I should have checked for an online calculator but just didn’t think of it. It would have been easier than doing it by hand. Found it interesting that a circle with a three hundred ft. circumference enclosed more sq. feet than a seventy-five ft. square. Probably had learned this stuff in kindergarten but forgot it.

 

[Chainsaw]

Wood duck, for sure electric would be cheaper and I do have a 200 sq. Ft. Electric fence (battery powered) enclosing my daylily garden area. Once the ground freezes and especially once the snow gets deep the electric fence is not needed as the deer leave the daylilies alone. The deer however would probably go opposite that and eat the trees more in the winter and early spring making good fence maintenance mandatory. I’m thinking there would be less maintenance with wire fencing versus electric. Have not had a solar fence before nor experience with running an electric fence in the snow and maybe am avoiding the idea because of those unknowns.

 

[Chainsaw]

I think your total tree count is off though. You are assuming every sq ft of area can be used to plant a tree and that’s just not the case. You won’t be planting right on top of the fence. So maybe 5’ of cushion along the fence? That shrinks the diameter from 95.5 to 85.5 before the first tree goes in. So your first row of trees if started dead center would yield 7 trees with each additional row getting less trees.

Actually Rit I haven’t graphed it out but was thinking the first row would follow the entire 300 ft of fence and then each row (circular rows) would get smaller as it went towards the center. Will play with that and see what might work the best.

 

[woodduck]

This is true. I suppose with the snow depths you receive you could loose a strand or 2 under snow and lessen the height of your fence at the same time. I suppose all the zap a fence could give would be useless if a deer could easily jump over it.

 

[Rit]

Yes as you say they can jump a five ft. fence very easily but something about smallish enclosures they don’t seem to. I had planned on a top wire a ft. Higher with flagging tape to give them an illusion of a higher fence. The extra height on the posts would just be sticks tied or wired on to the posts.
Actually on the first row of trees I was thinking only one ft. from the fence as when individually fencing them most people have them 1 1/2 ft to 2 1/2 ft. From the fence. I thought the concrete wire like Sandbur used made sense. A few have even less. And yes no doubt some space would end up being unusable.

Since the wild trees here often grow with multi trunks ranging from two to six, some trees will be planted that way. It will take them longer to grow but their growth will reduce weed tree invasion into the thickets.

Thank you for the verification Rit on the calculations, I should have checked for an online calculator but just didn’t think of it. It would have been easier than doing it by hand. Found it interesting that a circle with a three hundred ft. circumference enclosed more sq. feet than a seventy-five ft. square. Probably had learned this stuff in kindergarten but forgot it.

Good for you to be able to do that by hand. No chance I was getting that done.

I was thinking they may jump a 300’ enclosure more than a 100’ one but your plan for that extra foot would make all the difference and putting them closer to the fence would yield you more trees.

I had to do a bit of digging before I understood the formula to calculate the area of a circle. Interestingly though as I was reading I found the area of a circle at those intervals to be bigger than a square and way bigger than a triangle. All something I probably learned 35 years ago and don’t remember none of it. Good luck

 

[Chainsaw]

Thanks Sandbur for the keep it fun point. Working full bore single focused on projects is fun for me. After implementation though(maintenance) is not so fun so projects are done to be as low maintenance as possible. And there will always be more work to do than I can ever accomplish. The entire property is considered a garden for the deer and gardens are ever evolving and really never complete. And the thinking, and planning and even over thinking is just as much fun as the actual doing. And while I can get overwhelmed, mostly I’m just humming along one step at a time with no finish line in sight.

 

[Chainsaw]

And Chummer, the narrow cages with their smaller circle are stronger/ more self-supporting than a larger circle. The narrow cages looked to be doing the job at your place quite well. I don’t know if the narrow cages will also work out here but we have several I use right now so we’ll know soon. So far the narrow cages are working fine for some nursery’s trees but not at all for the nurseries sending the larger heavily branched trees.

 

[woodduck]

I don't know if this would work or not but if you had a 5 or 6 foot tall fence. Be it welded wire or concrete mesh. You could possibly add height to that enclosure by adding a wire or string a foot or so above the top of your fence creating an illusion that the fence is taller than it really is. Tying surveyors ribbon to that strand every few feet would help with that illusion. If your stakes weren't high enough you could weave sticks or even rip boards down to 1"x1" to thread up through the cage material sticking a foot or so above the top of your cage so you could get that height to attach your wire or string to. It probably doesn't have to be sturdy, just make the deer think it's taller than it is. Hopefully deturing them from jumping in. Probably the less sturdy that top run is the better also. That way if a deer does jump and gets entangled the less chance it will get hurt. Just a thought.

 

[chummer]

Good thing I dug them up and moved them back inside. Two nights of frost in a row and we aren’t even to the coldest nights yet. Next week looks awful as well. At least camp trees haven’t even started to pop yet.

 

[Chainsaw]

It is appearing Chummer that keeping the grafted rootstock plants dormant and planting outside early like in April before any signs of life show might be an option worth considering for next year. About twenty of mine were planted in April in full dormant stage and are still dormant with just hints of possible life beginning to show. It will be interesting to see which planting time works out best when all is said and done. Am still holding off planting many, many leafed out pears until this coming weekends cold front goes by.

 

[chummer]

Another covid project. My wife thinks it is for flowers but I might slip my grafts in here. When she figures out I am telling it was a guy named Chainsaws idea

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk

 

[Chainsaw]

You sure could grow some deep roots in that. Nice job. Wives blame me for lots of stuff, as long as it isn’t mine it doesn’t hurt much.
One more cold night and we are home free yet again.

 

[Chainsaw]

All grafted root stocks are now in the ground. Many took bad hits from some of last weeks freezes; will give them a few days to see if some of the froze ones come back to life. Many of them have a bud wrapped in under the grafting tape and maybe some of them survived, we'll see. Am interested in knowing how everyone made out with their seedlings thru all of the frosts and freezes.

Checked on the apple seeds planted directly into the ground last winter; they weren't doing well. I think the temps in the twenties was killing them as they germinated. Just in case they were being eaten by geese or rabbits, I fenced them and a few more came up and survived last weeks weather but direct in the ground winter planting was basically a bust here this year.

Planning to test it again next fall/winter.
On a positive note the seeds planted in jugs are doing great. Opened up three jugs yesterday to see how they are handling all of these crazy temperature swings and they were all doing fine.

Notice that the seedlings in the jug to the left have grown less than the seedlings in the right hand jug. The seedlings to the left and the jug next to it are in less quality jugs and and the cut seam in the jugs was taped with a cheaper duct tape and had come loose in spots letting air in and more moisture out. The better growing seedlings were in a Poland Springs jug which is of higher quality than the others used. The better growing seedlings jug was also sealed with a better duct tape, a heavy black Gorilla tape. The Gorilla tape was strongly attached to the jug with zero leak spots. All jugs were outside thru winter and spring sitting against each other along with fifty or so other jugs. Two different soils were used and maybe jug one had one kind and another had another kind. And I had not marked which had which as testing different soils was not in the picture at the time. The two different soils used were Miracle Grow seed starting mix and Jiffy seed starting mix. There were no weeds in any of the jugs.

Here is a closeup of the left hand jug;


And here is a closeup of the better growing jug from the pic of the three jugs;


Notice that there is more moisture in the better growing jug and that one leaf is actually covered in ice! And once melted that leaf looks just fine. The jugs will now be resealed and put back outside in among the other jugs. Thus winter jug planting of apple seeds and immediately after planting seeds placing the planted jugs outside in January or February worked fine here during this its first year of testing here. While all jugs performed satisfactorily some jugs performed better than others but we don't know why yet. Transplanting of the jug seedlings to a garden bed will begin as time permits likely in two weeks if no additional freeze warnings surface.

 

[chummer]

Looks great Dave. I might have to down grade to 14 our of 20. A couple I thought were opening have stopped. Not sure if I screwed them up by digging them back up. The more you handle the better the chance for something to go wrong. On a positive the cold has really held the camp trees back. There is only a couple showing tight clusters. Looks like all my transplants are going to make it, and I got all my trees limed and two ton of lime on the new and old plots

 

[Chainsaw]

Good going Jeremy. You have got a lot done already this year.Also it looks like pulling the just grafted ones was a good move.

 

[Chainsaw]

It has been a while (last post in May)since I’ve posted on this thread so to recap from where we left off- many nights in a row of near freezing and freezing temperatures were threatening our freshly planted apple seedlings. Most of the developed leaves on them were frozen and had turned black. The pears were still in pails and were being moved in and out daily waiting for the freezes to end before planting. Left the pears outside one night too early and most of them also got froze and had their leaves turn. So after the freezes ended the pears with any life on them were planted.

And then for the second time in thirty years the garden saw drought conditions all summer amid all time record setting heatwaves. Still one by one new tiny apple leaves appeared on many of the damaged Apple seedlings and eventually the stems began to grow and sprout their own leaves. The seedling garden is 1/4 mile away from running water. Trucked in a few hundred gallons and watered them a couple of times but it should have been done maybe twenty times. Also many seedlings were broken off of their graft during watering and the subsequent branch trimming that followed a week after watering.

So as of September 05 we are down to 44 surviving pear tree seedlings and 204 surviving Apple tree seedlings. After all of that It is a wonder that any of them survived.
Below are the seedlings as they looked two days ago. Pears are to the left of the walkway,
and apples are to the right of the walkway.
Best Apple growth was with Antonovka seedling rootstock versus various clonal rootstocks. Note- did not have any Dolgo rootstock last season. As you can see the seedlings range from mostly two feet up to 52 inches at this time. And though many losses were from the week of cold weather there were also many that had weak grafts likely from my yet to be developed proper grafting skills. The drought did not appear to kill any of the seedlings but it did keep most of the Apple leaves from functioning so growth was severely curtailed. The pear leaves seemed to handle the dryness much better and never got waxed up like the apple leaves did. So there were a lot of failures, some ok’s and a few wins but the game goes on. Lots more to report on over the next week or so.

 

[chummer]

You did better than me. Mine started off great and have died one by one. I am down to 3 survivors but the rootstock bounced back and us growing great so I can try again next year.

 

[Chainsaw]

You did better than me. Mine started off great and have died one by one. I am down to 3 survivors but the rootstock bounced back and us growing great so I can try again next year.[/QUOTE)


Chummer, the day we grafted together we were using extremely tiny scions from trees that had perhaps never been trimmed. I think I had only one survivor from that group. If not for the freezing we may have been okay but freeze it did and those marginal scions were weak to start with. And though clonal rootstocks which we used that day are in use widespread, they were significantly out performed by seedling rootstocks used later that spring. I’m done with clonal rootstocks until shown otherwise.

Further we must trim and fertilize our favorite old apple trees if we are to realize decent scions for future grafting use. So no I didn't do better than you, the difference result was simply due to using different rootstock and larger scions later in the grafting season. In the beginning of grafting I unknowingly cut scions that didn’t have much of a chance of taking.

The good news is I have one Apple seedling grafted from your Centerfield tree that is doing well and with a little luck it could yield us five or six good scions for 2021 grafting. And that many Centerfield trees can add to both of our properties.

 

[chummer]

I spread a 100 lbs of lime under the mother tree in the spring. It has some good water sprouts going if they can avoid being browsed. I have more deer around since before the two year polar vortex a few years ago. Plots are looking good and my daughter has her license. Setting up for a good season.