Tamarack advice

Good morning! Looking for advice/opinions about using tamarack as fence posts. I’m planning an 8’ tall high tensile fence to keep deer out of a community garden. The board is unwaveringly against treated wood and cedar is out of the budget, so we’re getting tamarack logs. Area is Michigans Upper Peninsula, so we’re planning to set them 3-4’ deep.

Questions are:

1. Peel the logs or no? 1/3 of them already are peeled but the rest are being cut now and wont be unless we peel them. Since some already are, it might look better if we peel them all. But a local woman here used unpeeled tamarack for posts and got 30 years out of them before they rotted off.

2. Backfill the holes with pea gravel or no? Or something else? Same woman referred to above backfilled with gravel and they lasted 30 years.

3. Char the butts or no? Seems like this would help with longevity but will also add a lot of time and effort to the process and Im not sure if its worthwhile.

4. How likely are we to be able to pound fence staples into this stuff? I figure green maybe but dry, probably not. I do have access to a Milwaukee battery stapler so maybe that would work better than a hammer.

Any advice or opinions are appreciated!

In MN I never encountered a rotten Tammarac fence post…no matter how it was processed. That said, I am suspect all the measures you mention would help .