It’s tree planting season! A lot of gardeners like to plant trees in the fall to give their roots a little extra time in the ground, but I tend to plant out my perennials at the tail end of winter through early spring. To be honest, fall season is already busy enough for our family with harvesting and processing food and seeds.

I often plant perennials roughly in the order that they wake up. Trees like our native Oregon bay laurel are evergreen and slowly grow through the winter. Elderberry is quite cold tolerant and one of the first deciduous trees to wake up and start making leaves, even before most fruit trees start flowering. Aronia, paw paws, apples, pears and others follow. Vitex is one of the last non-native medicinal shrubs to leaf out in the spring, but our native oaks might actually be the last. (They are so wise!)

I tend to watch the leaf buds on the otherwise naked deciduous trees who overwintered in nursery pots. When I see the buds starting to swell, I know the feeder roots, or the white colored root tips, are also slowly starting to grow under the soil. The swelling buds give me a cue that it’s time to plant the trees if I didn’t already plant them while they were fully dormant.

I am writing this in early March. In our zone 7b-ish Mediterranean climate, the soil is still very wet and cold. We expect more precipitation through spring, but when and how much is up to Mother Earth. The plants will certainly have a chance to get “rained in” and wake up comfortably before things really warm up. I enjoy being fairly hands off with regards to irrigation for at least a month, maybe two or three if we are lucky with extra spring rains, before the top layer of soil starts to dry out.

When I plant trees I am also thinking about protecting them from deer. On this particular land, local deer usually leave my small, newly planted trees pretty much alone until they are leafed out. Even then the deer are not necessarily going to pounce on my trees until the seasons shift and grass starts to dry out. That’s when deer seem to start craving more tree and shrub browse again.

But I don’t take any chances and I protect my newly planted fruit trees from deer immediately after planting. It saves me the trouble of having to come back and protect them later and it reduces the risk that some hungry dear might chomp a just-planted tree’s leaves or tender tips.

I’ve planted a fair number of fruit trees inside our greater deer fenced garden space. It’s nice to be able to plant those trees and not have to worry if a deer will bother them, as long as our deer fence is solid.

The rest of our fruit trees and all of our nut trees are planted outside the garden fence. I really appreciate not having to deer fence our entire property because it would be so labor and cost prohibitive. I especially appreciate being able to offer deer and many other furry and feathered wildlife safe passage through a good portion of this land, which would not be possible if we deer fenced the whole space.

Since they are not within the deer fence, I need to individually protect each tree, or sometimes groups of trees, from hungry deer. I’ve experimented a lot over the years and learned so much about effective ways to protect fruit and nut trees.

I really enjoy having a conversation with deer through trees’ leaves. I allow deer some limited direct access to many of my trees and they get to eat some leaves here and there. Over the years I’ve been learning how to listen to both the trees’ needs and the deer’s hungry desires. It’s a dialog between the deer, the trees and the gardener.

I learn how to dance the edge between absolutely excluding deer and not protecting the tree enough. On one extreme, the deer can’t even get close to the tree, on the other extreme the deer eat too much of my tree’s leaves.

In fact, some pruning by the deer can be healthy for a tree, but too much will set a tree back a season, or worse, kill it. As gardeners we are all as unique as our different trees and we have the opportunity to decide how much or how little access we want to allow deer to our trees.

As I look around the yards in our community and the surrounding wild forests I see plenty of examples of fully mature fruit and nut trees that are not protected from deer. This reminds me that eventually I will remove the protections from many of my trees when they are mature and no longer needed.

In the meantime, I spend a lot of time observing how deer interact with wild and native trees. It’s really informed my knowledge as well as my attitude about how I protect trees from deer. If nothing else, I am filled with gratitude and wonder for nature and how amazing and symbiotic life is.

Wishing you and your garden many blessings this season!

Protect Fruit and Nut Trees from Deer and Rodents

Want to grow trees more naturally in the presence of deer? You don’t need to install a costly deer fence around your entire orchard or property. Protect your fruit and nut trees individually from deer. Fine tune deer protection based on your goals, habits of your local deer and any inherent deer resistant qualities within your trees. Allow deer and other wildlife safe passage through the land you steward.

See our course Protect Fruit and Nut Trees from Deer and Rodents for more details!

Recommended Reading

• Deer Resistant Herbs for Resilient Gardens
• Are There Any Reliably Deer Resistant Fruit Trees and Shrubs?
• Growing Trees More Naturally In the Presence of Deer

Got Deer? Read on!

Want more stories and tips about gardening in the presence of deer? Our family has been doing a lot of experimenting with deer resistance of herbs, flowers and fruit & nut trees. Come learn with us… browse our archive of articles about how we garden with deer!

Gardening with Deer