I live in West Virginia, so will not recommend a nursery; and many other things might be different, too. I have a strong fence around my vegetable garden, and five-foot chickenwire around my cropfields, but my orchard only has hardware cloth rings a couple feet tall around each tree, and pea gravel in a ring a foot or so in diameter around the base so rodents and borers will ideally be exposed, and that has sufficed. I have free range chickens, and I didn't want to exclude them from the orchard; they help with ticks and grasshoppers and probably other bugs. If you lived here, I'd tell you not to plant this year at all because of the 17 year katydids--but I don't think Brood V extends to WI. I fertilize my trees with humanure, and sometimes something stronger (the humanure is low nutrient because little urine gets in the buckets). My three dwarf apples grew quite fast, swiftly outpacing the two semidwarf and one standard pear--this may be partly because I was so cautious as first about fertilizing or pruning pears because of fireblight. But we got hit with fireblight two years ago and it turned out it affected two of my apples, had no affect on the Priscilla apple or any of the pears (Blake's Pride, Potomac and Moonglow)...I had chosen all the varieties with disease resistance as my top consideration, and have never sprayed any of them with anything. The two affected apples were Enterprise and Goldrush--but they only lost some branch ends, nothing major. I actually want to urge you to get a Goldrush, as this is my pride and joy. It seems to bear heavily every year; it started younger than any other tree, bore despite losing half the crop the year of the fireblight, bore after a May frost that killed all the other fruit one year, and last year with none of those problems I had to thin it heavily three times and still had a couple broken branches from the load. TheGoldrush apples have less insect damage than the other two, and are very crisp, juicy, sweet, spicy, and are possibly the longest keeping of all apples--my last few are in the rootcellar now, in late March. Enterprise has been pretty good, another disease-resistant one with big red apples, a little earlier, but has fewer fruit and more insect damage. Priscilla is an early apple and is okay (I prefer late, hard apples). I thought standards might be better in some ways, better rooted (you need a permanent post for support for a full dwarf) but I have to admit certain chores are difficult even with these ten foot dwarfs...I recommend Phillips' first book, the Apple Grower. It's loaded with the spirit of one called to his vocation...but not so full of the woo-woo stuff as the second one.