Tree guards are important. I had two newly installed apple trees from 2024 that I did not get 1/4" hardware cloth protection around before the first snow. Both of them looked like the poor guy on the left in the image below. Every tree that had 1/4" hardware cloth wrapped around it looked okay (like the guy on the right) even though the weed control in this planting is poor for now. The voles got about 6" of material all the way around both unguarded trunks. It's a good reminder to get these tree guards up. I just ordered biodegradable spiral tree guards from A.M. Leonard. I will get these on new plantings in 2025 and report back in 2026 about how well they work. 1/4" hardware cloth is great, but it is also pretty pokey for human hands and allows weeds and (undesirable/too low) baby apple limbs to get tangled.
I tried a new method of collecting scion wood. Essentially, I grabbed all the clipped branches and laid them neatly in the snow adjacent to the tree from which they had been pruned. While this would not necessarily be feasible for a semi-dwarf pruning (due to the extreme number of cuts required on a much larger semi-dwarf vs these fully dwarf trees), it worked pretty well for harvesting scion wood from this small planting. It was a much easier way to keep straight which scions went with which tree (see images below).
Afterwards, I went through and taped up each bundle and wrote the tree number it came from (1-30) on the masking tape. I took home all of the wood, but in future years, I think it would be better to only harvest scion wood from the trees varieties that I want to propagate, and to neatly pile the rest of it for wood chipping or brush piling later. The large pieces were unwieldy to transport, and I have more scion wood than I could ever feasibly use.
I processed the bundles en masse over the next two days at my kitchen table (image above) and moved all the non-scion wood into a brush pile in the woods near my house.
I put the rest in a giant dark garbage bag in a bucket in my garage with some wet paper towels, an ice pack, and some ice chunks. I'm hoping the ice and paper towels will keep it moist in there, especially after taping it up with masking tape, and that the Michigan winter temps of my unheated garage will keep the scions dormant until they can be grafted. I'll find out and report back during grafting season later this spring.
The deer fence is working. Note the crazy amount of snow disturbance outside the fenced area in the image below.
The snow disturbance inside my electric fence is all from me standing or kneeling while pruning. The snow disturbance outside is all hungry deer, rooting around under the snow looking for a snack. This is the other reason I took all my scion wood with me. I didn't want to clue the deer in to the tasty snack on the other side of the electric fence.
Also, look at the pristine condition of the snow inside the newly fenced kiwiberry area. You can clearly see my footprints, but no deer have been snacking through these young, establishing plants. I do not think this kind of electric fence would work without the secondary training wires in the apple and kiwiberry area (functioning kind of like a 3D fence in that the deer cannot tell how far they need to jump to clear it), but I have no counterfactual. There really is plenty of other easily accessible deer food on the farm, so perhaps they're just ignoring the fenced food that's slightly more work?
I will report in on rootstock propagation efforts. I also harvested some scion wood from trees that had been eaten down to just rootstock (and so the scion wood itself was just rootstock). I will post next about my efforts to root these cuttings.
5/2/25 update. Some rootstock were placed into moist soil, some were put in a vase of water. All had some amount of rooting hormone used. All failed. No evidence of rooting on any of them.
