North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["William C. Garthright" <billg@inebraska.com>]

> If you securely tie the netting right to the trunk, will that keep 
> raccoons out?  Or do they just rip it apart and proceed with their 
> feasting?  Apart from eating the fruit, they wreck the trees by 
> climbing out to the end of branches and breaking them.


Has anyone tried an electric fence - a pet/small animal fence, not a 
high-powered cattle fence - to keep raccoons and other critters from 
their trees? I'm starting to set one up here.

My backyard is surrounded by a chainlink fence, and I've already covered 
that with chickenwire to keep the rabbits out. So I'm running a strand 
of electric wire along the top. The squirrels might be smart enough - 
and agile enough - to avoid it, but I'd think it would definitely work 
for raccoons and opossums.

I've got some trees outside the fence, too, but I thought I'd put up a 
short, temporary fence around them, with an electric wire at the top. 
The fence is mainly to keep the electric wire away from the grassy 
vegetation, and to force the animals to climb. But if you were just 
worried about raccoons, you might be able to just fasten insulators to 
the trunk itself. Raccoons don't jump, do they? If they just climb the 
trunk, that would be a pretty simple way to discourage them.

Admittedly, my trees are very small. When they get larger, it will 
almost certainly get harder to keep the squirrels out (and out of the 
backyard, too). They're so very agile, after all. But I'd think an 
electric wire would work very well for raccoons. Has anyone tried it?

Bill
Lincoln, NE (zone 5)

--
Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before 
breakfast. - White Queen, "Alice in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll