Protecting apple trees from rodents during the cold season is important and quite challenging task every gardener. This is because to effectively protect young trees you need to spend a lot of time and at the same time use the necessary amount of resources. The most common rodents that cause the most damage to young seedlings are: mice, hares and wild rabbits. They love the young bark of apple trees because they find it nutritious and easily accessible. Most often, rodents gnaw on the bark and roots of apple trees at the end of winter and early spring, when low temperatures, and they cannot find food for themselves. Hares and rabbits gnaw at the bark around the root collar, and mice gnaw on the roots. Rodents can gnaw the bark on one side or along the entire diameter of the trunk, which is very dangerous for young trees. Moreover, if the bark is gnawed across the entire diameter of the trunk, then it is almost impossible to cure the trees. Therefore, it is very important to know how to properly protect apple trees from rodents in winter.
Prevention of damage to apple trees by rodents
Preventing damage to the bark of apple trees is very important because it allows you to keep the garden intact and healthy. The main preventive measures include:
- In the fall, be sure to collect all leaves, weeds and debris. This must be done to prevent mice from getting in.
- Before winter, you need to dig up the entire garden or around the crown of each tree. Digging is done to the depth of a shovel, while the depth of digging at the trunk should be such as not to damage the roots.
- At the end of autumn or at the beginning of winter, when stable frosts have already established, you need to wrap the trunks of young apple trees with protective material. It is necessary to wrap in such a way that the entire trunk is reliably protected from the ground to the branches, while it is desirable that the main part of the lower branches is also protected. Any material can be used as a protective material, preferably light colors, this will reduce the heating of the barrel on sunny days. Often used as a protective material agrofibre, white burlap (polypropylene bags), nylon stockings. Such protection is quite effective, as it allows you to preserve important parts of the young tree from rodents. You should not wrap apple trees with black protective materials, as they heat up very quickly in the sun. There is also no need to wrap young trees with straw or other organic materials that may encourage mice.
- A reliable fence can serve as good protection for a young garden, although if there is a lot of snow, hares can jump over it.
- Wild rodents are afraid of sounds they do not understand, so you can additionally use plastic bottles, as tools for making noise. They need to be cut and hung on the branches of young trees; at the slightest breath of wind it will create noise that is unbearable for rodents and will drive them away. But here you need to understand that unbearable hunger at the end of winter can overcome their fear.
- Are quite reliable chemicals repelling rodents from seedlings. Such preparations can be purchased at any garden store. In addition, if you have creolin and sawdust, you can independently prepare a mixture to repel rodents. To do this, you need to saturate the sawdust with creolin and spread the mixture around the seedlings with a roller.
- To protect against mice, you need to trample the snow around each tree, since these rodents move under it. You need to trample the snow within a meter radius after each heavy snowfall.
Protecting young apple trees from rodents is a responsible task that needs to be done every year, even if rodents have not previously chewed the bark. In my garden, young apple trees grew safely for decades without any protection, but one year a lot of young seedlings were damaged. Therefore, it is very important to always be prepared to prevent losses, even if there is no visible danger.
Today I’ll tell you how I found out about the original way protecting apple trees from mice in winter and how this method helped.
You yourself know that every autumn you have to decide how to protect your apple trees from any winter scourge. If the garden is not far from the forest, then in addition to mice, hares will also cause mischief. I have to drive 20 kilometers to the forest; I live almost in the center of a large village. There are no hares in the surrounding area, but voles do come. So you have to think about what needs to be done so that (the apple tree, apricot or plum tree is saved) is effective.
My cat.
We have a cat, or maybe a she-cat. We don't know who it really is. Because it is impossible to determine the sex of an animal. There's no point in going to the vet.
The cat is the guardian of the apple trees.
This cat lived at the enterprise where I worked. Huge, he weighed seven kilograms, if not more. Imposing. Well-groomed, clean and affectionate. Not to everyone. For some reason he liked me, he met me in the morning, saw me off in the evening, and always meowed loudly. He lived on the street, he was not allowed into the premises, so he found a warm pipe somewhere, even in very cold winter not frozen.
One day I left work late in the winter, it was dark outside, and he was standing and waiting for me. We talked to him, and he accepted my offer to change apartment. He took it in a very original way - he jumped on my shoulder. So I carried him to the bus stop on my shoulder. On the bus he sat on his knees and did not try to escape. And at our stop my husband met me, the cat rushed into the car as if he was born in it.
Why so detailed? Because his merit in saving and protecting apple trees from mice in winter turned out to be magnificent.
Television show.
In the fall, when it was time to come up with something to protect the apple trees, I again started collecting old things from the garden. I bought Creolin. Although I know that this does not help, there is at least some hope that I can save and protect the apple trees.
And here is a local television program about fruits and vegetables. And there they talked about the cat scent. What a shame - I don’t have a cat litter box. After all, the cat lives outside from mid-March to mid-October. I urgently bought sawdust litter, persuaded the cat to use the tray, and he, being smart, understood it. But the cat was only two weeks old, and no matter how hard he tried to fill the tray with his extract, it didn’t work out well.
Tray with filler and a lump of “extract”.
Or rather, it turned out well, but not enough. After all, the poop itself had to be removed, leaving only the urine. She was entrusted with the most responsible mission - apple tree protection from mice in winter.
The first time I lightly powdered the soil around the apple trees with the sawdust described, I did it sparingly.
Then, after the first snow, which did not melt, she trampled circles around the trees and again sprinkled them with sawdust, but this time thicker and not only around the circle, but close to the trunk. it was such that it seemed that all the neighbors would suffocate from this amber. What about the mice? Will they also suffocate or get scared?
This treatment turned out to be the last, we have so much now that we didn’t even try to compact it under the apple trees.
There was not enough cat litter for all the apple and plum trees, so for one area apple tree protection was ordinary - creolin. It was sprinkled after the onset of stable frosts on the grass, and then on the trampled snow. The grass under the trees was cut right down to the ground. It seems there is nowhere for mice to live.
Protecting apple trees from mice in winter.
At the end of February, we decided that it was time to stop being afraid of high snow and went to dig up apple trees to see if help was needed. We prepared a garden varnish, it warmed up well in the stoker, became plastic, it would be easy to cover up frost holes or those places where mice were misbehaving. But they didn’t misbehave, they frolicked, they made a feast for themselves. Apple tree protection and draining with creolin turned out to be ineffective this year; all the branches and trunks were eaten away from ground level to snow level. In some places it is 2 meters.
And where the protection of apple trees was left to the cat's litter box, all the trees remained untouched.
All winter I collected and stored the filler outside, but not sawdust, but clumping one. After digging up, we again perfumed the places around the trunks, let the mice rejoice.
Now we are waiting for real spring, when it starts to fade. Then it will be clear how good cat musk is for protecting apple trees and plums from mice in winter.
A friend sent me this. All about cats.
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When preparing apple trees for winter, care should be taken not only to protect them from the upcoming prolonged frosts, but also from rodents - primarily mice and hares. These animals can cause particular harm after the cold weather arrives, when food begins to be scarce.
What harm do rodents cause?
Even the smallest rodents can cause severe damage to apple trees. They do not consume the bark of apple and pear trees as food; they are slightly less interested in plums and cherries (their bark has a characteristic bitterness). Seedlings and young fruit trees suffer the most from rodent infestations.
In most cases, the bark is gnawed off in a vertical strip on one side of the trunk. Sometimes the lower section of the trunk remains completely bare, and then the probability of plant death is especially high. If this happens to your young apple tree, treat the damaged area Bordeaux mixture and cover the wound with garden varnish.
How to protect fruit trees from rodents?
Before the snow falls, conduct a cleanup day and clear your area of fallen leaves, small branches and other plant debris. The procedure should be carried out closer to mid-autumn, when the trees are almost bare.
Our neighbors were digging up more around the young seedlings. tree trunk circles(mini ditches). I don’t know how effective the method is, the main thing is not to damage the roots.
It is imperative to wrap the trunk with a covering material that will protect the tree from both cold weather and rodents. It must be of inorganic origin (organics can, on the contrary, attract rodents) and be colored white(the dark color will accumulate heat from the sun's rays).
From modern covering materials you can use agrofibre, from old, time-tested ones - stockings and tights made of nylon.
You need to wrap it properly, with a slight overlap, there should be no gaps left. Dig the soil around the trunk of the apple tree to a shallow depth. Start wrapping from the bottom right from the very roots and gradually twist to the level of the first skeletal branch. At the end of the procedure, fill the hole at the base with earth. This way, the bottom of your winding will be underground, and rodents will not be able to easily get to the base of the bole.
Before covering, many summer residents additionally coat the trunk with a solution of lime with tar or cryolin added to it. The pungent odor of these substances will cause rodents to keep their distance.
Also in a good way is to mulch the base of the apple tree with sawdust soaked in various strong-smelling substances (just do not use kerosene, grease and various oils - they can leave burns on the tree).
According to the observations of experienced summer residents, mice simply “can’t digest” the smell of burnt wool and the aroma of coriander.
Wrapping with spruce branches is one of the available and therefore common means of protecting apple trees from rodents in winter. Fluffy spruce branches are tied to the trunk with their needles down. The resulting improvised “broom” is securely tied around the trunk with a rope. If available, place an iron mesh with the smallest mesh possible on top of the spruce branches.
Another classic option involves the use of roofing felt. I do not recommend using it, because dark color this coating attracts sun rays, besides, he does not “breathe”. If you still use roofing felt, do not forget to dismantle the shelter in time in the spring.
If you are frequent guests at your summer cottage If there are hares, it makes sense to additionally make a mini-fence made of metal mesh around each seedling. It needs to be dug into the ground properly.
By the way, I recently saw another one on the dacha forum interesting way. Take 2 plastic bottles of 1.5 liters. The ends are trimmed. The bottom bottle is passed through the trunk from top to bottom and pressed slightly into the ground with force. wide part. The second bottle is lowered down the barrel narrow end down. Eventually it should fit into the top cut on the bottom bottle. This plastic protection is good against both mice and hares.
Many gardeners are concerned about the problem of protection fruit trees from rodents in winter. Most often, trees in our gardens suffer from hares, mice and rats in winter and early spring. Moreover, hares come to hunt in gardens as early as November, and mice usually begin to feed on bark closer to spring. There are many effective ways to protect trees from rodents; a wide variety of available means are suitable for their implementation.
Most better protection to keep hares away from the site there is a continuous fence without gaps above the ground. The height of the fence must be at least 1.5 meters. Hares will not be able to overcome such a fence even taking into account the height of the snow cover. The fence can be made of corrugated sheets, medium-sized chain-link mesh, frequent picket fences, boards, etc.
In order to prevent rodents from settling on your site for the winter, it is necessary to prevent them from settling in the house in the summer. To do this, under the porch, veranda, in the basement, and if there is no cat in the house, then under the cabinets, it is necessary to place and constantly check and add poisoned grains and other rodent control products sold in hardware and garden stores. It is better to use several types. Another good way to fight rodents in the house and cellars is with the help of special glue, for example, “Kotofey”, “ALT”, “Brownie. Proshka." On thick, non-porous cardboard or old pallet no smaller than 30x30 cm in size (if there is a possibility of the presence of rats, the size should be larger), glue is applied, and a piece of bait is placed in the center white bread With vegetable oil. Apply the glue taking into account the fact that it is very sticky, viscous, and subsequently spreads more evenly. We have been using Domovoy glue at our dacha for three years now and are very pleased. The glue retains its sticky consistency for a long time if it is not exposed to water and dust.
In the fall, after harvesting, do not leave heaps of grass, straw and garbage on the site so that mice do not settle there for the winter. Compost heaps It also needs to be covered well.
If you have a cat and buy wood cat litter for him, don't throw away the used one. This is sawdust with a strong cat smell. Definitely, mice will not like this aroma. Sprinkle used litter on the ground around fruit tree trunks starting in September.
Mice and hares are rather cowardly creatures, so various “noise makers”, “rattles” and “scarecrows” hung on tree branches in the fall help. You can make them from any available materials, including old children's toys, laser discs, tin cans and plastic bottles. The main thing is that it should make noise, knock, rattle, crackle, etc. in the wind.
In October, tree trunks and lower branches can be sprayed with Bordeaux mixture (1:10 dilution), thickly whitened or painted with special garden paint, sold in specialized stores. Spraying and painting must be done at positive temperatures; a small amount of creolin must be added to the lime and paint. The smell of creolin perfectly repels rodents. The height of the painting must be at least a meter above the ground.
You can sprinkle a ring of wood ash or sawdust with the addition of creolin.
You can coat tree trunks and lower branches with clay. The clay solution should have the consistency of thick sour cream; add a tablespoon of creolin or carbolic acid to 10 liters of solution. Coating is carried out at a temperature environment above zero, to a height of at least a meter above the ground. At the end of October, many gardeners tie tree trunks with various available materials. This can be roofing felt, roofing felt, parchment, spruce branches (needles down), fine mesh plastic mesh (mesh size less than 0.5 cm), nylon mesh for windows, synthetic fabrics, women's tights, construction ecowool (made from wood cellulose and borax), etc. .d. It is not advisable to use metal mesh, since in severe frost the mesh becomes hot and the trees can get cold burns. It is better to carry out tying when frosts have already begun. They tie the trees without leaving any gaps. It is better to cover the lower part of the binding material with earth. The height of the harness is usually 70-100cm. It is better to whiten or paint dark-colored materials (roofing felt, for example) on the outside so that they do not heat up in the sun.
The next way to protect your garden from rodents is to compact the snow around the trees. It is necessary to properly compact and trample snow starting in December, when the height of the snow cover on the ground reaches 20 centimeters. They make an indent of about fifteen to twenty centimeters from the tree trunk and compact the snow tightly in a continuous ring without breaks. Snow compaction is carried out several times until the end of March, especially after snowfalls. By March, the thickness of the continuous compacted ring around the trunk should be 20-30 centimeters.
I hope that my advice will be useful and help you. Have a good harvest!
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