Do you need to fence cuttings?

[TimberHawk]

I have 2+ acres of pure reed canary on my place that I've been struggling with. I'm going to keep throwing in some longer cuttings that I've had marginal success with and will continue to plant 100-200 ROD seedlings into it every year, but I'm getting impatient and decided to do ten 20' pockets of landscaping fabric and cuttings in spring '22 to get something growing. I had good success with this on a screen I tried this year so I know it will work, but I fenced the entire screen with snow fence. The deer browsed the hybrid poplar leaves pretty hard where they could reach over the fence. Do I stand any chance at success by leaving all or some of the pockets unfenced? Or would the fencing even do anything? They can easily jump the existing fenced screening, but none did and I assume it's because of the relatively narrow landing zone or possibly they don't like the look of the shiny black fabric. A 20x20' square with a 4' fence around it is an easy jump and landing zone for a deer to get a snack.

I'll be using one hybrid poplar cutting in the center of each pocket and a combination of silky willow from Big Rock Trees (supposedly deer resistance) and ROD and willows that I can harvest on my land.

 

[Diesel5610]

If you want timely results I would say yes. I planted an area to ROD and went with the outplant the browsing pressure theory. My ROD area is now a great cover area full of ROD but it took me a lot of years to get there. The deer kept them browsed back for a long time and I added a couple hundred more every year before they got ahead of the browsing pressure. They were cheap and easy to plant with a dibble bar so it worked but it took a lot longer than it needed to. Less plants with protection would have resulted in quicker results and I could have kept adding new plants and moving the cages to the new plants every other or 2 years. Once the roots are established the deer can browse them but can’t kill them, they just grow back stronger.

I have tried the same approach with Norway Spruce in a few areas and finally realized I had to cage the trees if I wanted them to survive and be any sort of cover before I die. That is proving to be a much quicker project with the caging. I will say I am in a very high deer density area so that probably has a lot to do with it.

 

[Thetrooper]

I've planted thousands of wild ROD, willow, and poplar as live stakes and cuttings without protection and had mixed results. I grew a few dozen out in pots and in a propagation box in the back yard as well. I'm going to do something similar to what you described this year. However I'm going to run more linear strips that are going to be fenced and landscape fabric layed like you and will be posting the results.

The biggest issue I've had besides browse is the weeds. Most of the dogwood, willow, and poplar root out at almost 90% rate just stuck in the soil raw, but in my area of OH if you have massive 4-6ft weed growth around them they will not make it with jlsuch an immature root system. I'm going to attempt using simazine and treflan as pre-emmergants in other areas instead of the landscape fabric to see what works best