Protecting my nuts

Well one nut.

One precious nut!

a precious walnut

This tree managed to set two nuts a couple of years ago (link), but they didn't ripen well. I'm suspecting that this year will be no better, but given a good autumn there is a chance that this nut could ripen. I'm wondering whether the wildlife will get it and what I can do to protect it.

Jay asked what my most likely nut swipers are here and I guess I'm not sure! Would the strategy be different for different critters? At the moment I'm thinking birds are the most likely - crows probably. Mice maybe. I'm lucky we don't have squirrels on Skye. What other animals like to eat nuts? The other possibility is that the weather could knock it off the tree before it is ripe - towards the end of September we often get quite a few storms, but I guess I can't control the weather!
At the moment the walnut tree is pretty small and one nut might be possible to protect - what about when (in my dreams) I have a large tree full of walnuts? This will be a more tempting target and also more difficult to protect.

What would you do? What strategies can I use now and in the future to try and get a walnut crop?

Squirrels are relentless with walnuts, honestly. With just the one nut it might be worth trying a mesh bag over it while it's still on the tree, not foolproof but it at least makes it harder for them to grab and run. Jays in my experience tend to go for things once they've dropped rather than stripping them off the branch, so keeping it bagged until it's ready to pick might help.

I'm thinking some sort of heavy gauge wire clamshell type thing. It would have to be easy to make, as you'd need a lot of them.

My friend uses some sort of curly stainless steel scrubby to keep rats from chewing their way into her Bantum Chicken Houses.  I wonder if you could pop those over your share of the nuts and let the wildlife take the rest? You'd have to buy in bulk to do any good!



I've heard people talk about giving squirrels a spot to "hide" the nuts, so the humans can take advantage of the squirrels, however, I have never once read a personal account of someone actually doing this and it being effective. I suspect squirrels are programmed to park their nuts in many different places (like every one of my planters, rather than a bunch all in one planter!) so I suspect designing such a system would be a lot of work with little benefit - someone please tell me they've made this work?

A squirrel planted an English Walnut in the old corral. It hasn't bloomed yet, but I expect it could any year now. There's no way I could build a shelter to cover the whole tree and I've seen how easily a determined squirrel can travel from tree to building to tree to its target (my cherries!) to know that keeping a squirrel out of the Walnut tree would be beyond me. So this is a very real, ongoing problem, that needs some genuinely effective solutions.

Jay Angler wrote:I'm thinking some sort of heavy gauge wire clamshell type thing. It would have to be easy to make, as you'd need a lot of them.

Hmm, I'm thinking something like a slightly larger tea ball infuser?

source

That one would be tricky to put on, but you can get sprung ones with handles:

source
They would come in a bit expensive though. These seem to be available up to 65mm diameter (about 2 1/2 inch) which would probably be big enough.
I guess if you could come up with a source for the cups you could use a simple clothes peg to act as the handle/clip.

No squirrels in Aotearoa, thank all relevant deities. But we do have rats. Lots of rats. And they probably get a third of my walnuts every year. Maybe 2/3 of my macadamias, which really grinds my gears. And I can put multiple traps out under the nut trees, bait them lovingly with peanut butter *and* fresh nut innards, and they totally give them a pass and keep swiping my nuts. They don't really go for the hazelnuts, which is a bit of a relief.

What I've tried to do recently is pick the nuts from the tree right as the husk shows signs of opening. Then I know they're about as ripe as they're going to get. But this only works on a smallish tree, and in another year or so it won't be an option.

Jay Angler wrote:
I've heard people talk about giving squirrels a spot to "hide" the nuts, so the humans can take advantage of the squirrels, however, I have never once read a personal account of someone actually doing this and it being effective. I suspect squirrels are programmed to park their nuts in many different places (like every one of my planters, rather than a bunch all in one planter!) so I suspect designing such a system would be a lot of work with little benefit - someone please tell me they've made this work?

Check out Joseph's experiences in this post.

Joylynn Hardesty wrote: Check out Joseph's experiences in this post.

Joseph is an awesome observer! His suggestion of 6 inches being a popular hole size could be an excellent place to start from!

I have a friend with both hazelnut trees and a walnut of some sort. My squirrels rarely come down to the ground and I don't know if that's because they don't need to, or because of safety issues as we have owls and other flying predators that occasionally hunt during the day.

I will think about this and see if I can figure out an easy system to experiment with.

I believe it's in the book Restoration Agriculture (or I read this here/online while reading that book recently) where someone placed several inches of sawdust around the base of nut trees, so the squirrels would harvest the ripe nuts and bury them in the sawdust. Then the human comes out and rakes them out of the sawdust and gives the squirrels a food reward in return. Then smooth out the sawdust again for the next batch of squirrel harvests.

That book also has some nice planting layout ideas for integrating nut and fruit trees with understory shrubs and plants for that perennial food forest a lot of people want, producing around 4 million calories in one acre after the trees are established but still producing serious amounts in the earlier years too. That's not including the annual crops you'd plant in between the rows of perennials which are spaced 23' apart, or if animals are your thing making it a silvopasture system with just enough live wire fencing to keep the critters from eating all the woody plants.

I'm wondering if some sort of metal tree guard/baffle like you see to protect bird feeders would help; they are solid metal and encircle the tree for about 3+feet from the base, and some flare out like a cone.  Animals wouldn't be able to gain purchase and just slide down.

Following up the rats eating nuts. When peanut butter doesn't work as bait for our live traps the next choice is avocado. We have a bandicoot (like a big hoppy rat) that learned to bump the live trap with its hindquarters and set it off, poke its nose through the bars and eat the bait. I attached the trap to a board and anchored the board to the ground with stakes to modify this and put metal around two sides to stop it poking its nose through. Have not caught it yet but not setting off the trap either. Some 'little people' are just damn smart!!!