A natural and humane winter Rabbit defense?

Hey everyone, welcome back to the food forest. Today's video is brought to you by Wren. We'll talk about them in a little bit, but I kind of like this sponsor because I can kind of talk about some of the projects they do and their permaculture related projects. So it's like a, you know, it's a commercial inside the video, but it's kind of interesting anyways. I would probably want to do a video about these guys regardless. So what we're going to do today is actually go and talk a little bit more about rabbits because I've learned a few more lessons that those little furry guys have taught me. So let's get going. Good morning, welcome back to the food forest. So today we're actually going to go around and we're going to look at where we're seeing rabbit activity and what we're going to do is look at what kind of trees the rabbits are really enjoying, where they're biting and more specifically what trees they're actually not bothering with. So any kind of more advanced older tree they really don't care about. They're really looking for that new growth. Now one thing I find is that every single year we always have a lot of rabbit traffic right in our raspberry patches, but we don't get a lot of damage in there. They actually don't really like eating the raspberries. They just like hiding and hanging out inside them or maybe they do nibble a little bit but I don't notice because there's just so many different canes. However one tree that they absolutely do love is apples. Now this apple tree actually has a trunk protector on it but it's buried under the snow and it clearly doesn't come up far enough and you can see they come right across the swale. They hang out in here. These are some hascap bushes and for the most part they're leaving the hascaps alone. Just a little further down they came over to autumn olive here and they did take a little bit of nibbles of the autumn olive but they looks like they took some and they kind of moved on from there. Now I should just mention this. Here's a trunk protector that's kind of from the store and I figured it was good enough but if there's no holes around your trunk protector then water can get in and freeze right up against the trunk. Now believe it or not ice is actually a little bit better of a thermal insulator than water is and the reason for that is that you know when you freeze water it actually expands. Everyone kind of knows that and because the molecules are further apart they actually transfer heat less readily than say water does and this is why often actually orchardists will spray their fruit trees so that they get frozen water on it and it actually acts as a protector for the buds in say early spring when you have a late frost coming in or a late freeze. It'll actually kind of protect the buds. It'll act as like a little protective layer. So the actual cold ice this will actually hit 32 Fahrenheit 0 Celsius and it really won't get too much colder than that so if your winters get down into you know the negative 30 negative 40 range then actually having a protection of ice can potentially help the tree. Another apple tree more severe damage all the way around. So I might have to replace quite a few trees this year and definitely learn my lesson to make sure that every single one of them not only has a collar but has a collar you know there's two feet of snow there and then you know all the way up. Here's another great example of another apple. You can see that they've really selectively chosen the apples. So another apple it's got probably about a two foot protector on it and it just wasn't tall enough because you get two feet three feet of snow build up and you lose the part of the tree above. So another apple probably going to be gone this year. Here's a pear that basically had got cut down last year and I obviously didn't learn the lesson and it re-grew and again rabbits took the pear out. So apples, pears and I'm also finding cherries. So pretty much any kind of stone fruit or anything related to apples. It could potentially be anything in the rosaceae family which would then expand it out further to some nut trees like pecans but pretty much any of your common fruit trees are in the rosaceae family including roses themselves but they really don't seem to pay any attention to stuff like service berries for example elderberries they really don't seem to care about elderberries, hasscaps, seabuckthorn. So it's really icy I want to be careful how much I'm walking around. There's a peach over there and I put a trunk protector on it and I remember when I put it on it it had no damage at all. So I think that one was okay. There's a peach over here in this island guild you can see it's got a trunk protector on it as well and when I put that one on it also had no damage. We do see a little bit of damage on the service berries here. I was scrambling around putting trunk protectors on trees before hockey and ran out of time so I'll probably put some on this one today but for the most part they seem to kind of avoid the service berries. One tree that they really like that I want to bring extreme attention to because this is potentially a learning moment here is this is the fig. So this is a fig that regrew it's a Chicago hardy fig so we actually cut it back down to the ground every year anyways because this part of the tree will die. It's just too cold up here for the fig however it's great rabbit food in the meantime and maybe a bit of rabbit deflection kind of like a sacrificial tree for the rabbits. So you maybe put it right next to another tree that you want and then the rabbits will actually preferentially eat the pear or the fig sorry they'll preferentially eat the fig instead of your other fruit tree. So this is why you come out in the winter time to make little observations like this. I want to take a minute and talk about the sponsor this video which is a company called REN. REN is a simple and effective way to make a difference in the climate crisis that we face but more importantly they fund a whole bunch of projects that expand beyond just carbon but also help with the natural ecosystem collapse that we're facing in the future. Once you sign up to make a monthly contribution to offset your carbon footprint you receive monthly updates for the projects that you support. You get to see what your money spent on with photos and details of every tree that's planted every acre that's reforested. The project that I want to draw attention to today is a community tree planting program in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. In this program REN engages TIST which is an international small group of tree planting and this is a program that's actually run by the participants. TIST hosts workshops and provides funding for the sustenance farmers in East Africa to plant and benefit from these trees. Farmers form small groups to support each other as they grow their new trees and they get paid by the TIST program not only to plant the trees but to also maintain the grows. This is really really important because agroforestry is really tricky. You can plant trees today but what if someone comes down and cuts them in 10 years? Farmers receive huge benefits from keeping the trees in the ground ranging from direct revenue of fruit, fuel when breaks, and assistance in climate control and the creation of rain patterns. This program is not just planting pines and lines. It's not just planting trees which is one of my biggest criticisms with tree planting programs. This program is actually creating diversity and planting to create a forest and they also monitor it. So part of this project they send monitors around called quantifiers and they will literally go out and measure the diameter of the trees and the health of the ecosystem to make adjustments on how the funding is being spent. So if you want to help make a difference go take a look in the description of this video and check out REN and the first 100 people who sign up using the link in my description will have an extra 10 trees planted in their name. That is a thousand free trees. Okay here we're in the lower orchard area. You can see that I've come down here before putting the trunk protectors on my pawpaws. I did that not because I saw any damage on them but because they're just so important to me. I've never had a pawpaw yet. They're a cool kind of talking piece fruit. You know when people come over here have you ever tried a pawpaw? North America's largest fruit that kind of thing. So I really want to make sure that these do okay. You can see I put a little bit of deer fencing around one of them that was getting eaten last year. So far so good. We do see deer damage down a little further on some of the apple trees but they haven't pushed up yet this year and I had saw no deer damage on any of these pawpaw. No rabbit damage on any of these pawpaws at all. So that's very good news. We've got some willow here as well and I was expecting to see a lot of deer rabbit damage on the willows because it's a great fodder crop. If you have goats and you want to give them some great healthy food that they really love willow is a great example. This is a corkscrew willow here. So willows are great examples especially weeping willows because they'll kind of weep down and then ducks goats can browse on them but not really damage the tree very much. So if you have livestock definitely consider getting willow. I was expecting to see a little bit more willow rabbit damage and potentially using those as a kind of sacrificial anode for my rabbits but no rabbit damage on the willows. So that's interesting. So Lucy kind of can come all the way down here. We expanded how far their fence goes and that way she can kind of hunt off and scare away the rabbits a little bit further into the wild and then we planted more plants for them a little further out in the wild stuff like those willows. But we might amend and fix that with figs now just learning a little bit more about what trees the rabbits really like. I think we might really add some figs and maybe some wild apples. We'll definitely be collecting apples, apple seeds and planting them all in our wilder areas. We'll do that this year this spring. And speaking of that we've got big plans coming up this year. My next video will probably discuss what things we're doing in here. A lot in here we're doing other things with partnerships trying to give you guys some promotions and deals and things that align with the channel always. So I think the next couple videos we'll focus on highlighting some of these projects that we're doing and we'll also talk about things that we're growing this year. Things that we're planting this year, different trees that we're adding into the food forest, where we're expanding, that kind of thing. If you guys don't have your seeds yet, if you haven't started ordering trees you definitely want to get on top of that and get started because places are going out of stock very very quickly. So make sure that you get whatever you need to do in terms of expanding your food forest this year. Thanks for watching everybody and I will see you on the next one.