By Island County Extension Agent, Donald B. Meehan
WINTER DAMAGE TO YOUNG FRUIT TREES
The winter is coming to a close for us soon, and it is a time to look over those young fruit trees. Winter damage is often considered a result of cold temperatures. This is not always the case. Small rodents and rabbits may have done their share of damage as well. Most likely the damage will be from rodents.
The damage rabbits and rodents create is a girdling of the young tree's bark. They do this because young tree bark is frequently a good feed supply for them in the winter months. Rodents especially like apple trees. How can you tell if your tree trunks have been victims of little gnawing teeth? Rabbit damage is easy to see since it takes place any where from the base up to 18 inches high along the trunk.
Damage created by rodents is generally hidden by the grass growing at the base of the tree. Every orchardist or home gardener needs to provide a protection program to eliminate this type of damage. If left unchecked, a young tree can become completely girdled of its life sustaining bark.
A protection program requires some common sense and an understanding of the habits of rabbits and mice. Rabbit damage can best be controlled by 1/4-inch wire mesh hardware cloth wrapped around the lower 24 inches of the tree trunk.
Mice are a different matter since their damage takes place where the trunk meets the soil. The critter we are plagued most with is the meadow mouse or vole. Its technical name is "microdus" and its preferred food is the apple tree. They also love apples. In general, the key point to remember about controlling mice is that they have predators. This fact is a major concern to them and that is why mice prefer to stay under cover at all times. If your trees were subject to mice damage, the odds are that you allowed the grass to grow up against the trunk. This same grass provided a nice protective cover for the mice as the fed on your tree's trunk.
Next year you can be prepared by removing all the grass in a two to three feet radius around the base of the tree. If this cleared area is filled in with coarse gravel, you will have effectively eliminated the protective cover for any mice. Don't forget to clean up fallen fruit, also.
Other ways of controlling mice include wire screening around the base of the trunk set into the soil, fresh blood meal deposited at the base of the tree, and the use of poison baits.
Should poisoning be an attractive alternative to you, please consider these points. First, you will never eliminate the mice population. you will only be able to control a small segment of it. If you use a rodenticide, you may also end up poisoning unintended consumers of the poison bait or predators of the mice may become poisoned by eating the mice.
If you have questions about controlling mice or rabbits that haven't been answered by this news column, contact me directly through the WSU-Cooperative Extension office.
By the way, if deer are a problem for you, the best way to stop them is high fencing. All other techniques work with varying degrees of success, even dogs.
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