Wrap your trees with hardware cloth to the top of the snow level to keep rabbits, voles (if you have them), and mice from girdling the trees. There are also commercial tree wraps that do the same thing for more money.
I really miss when we used to be able to get cuttings of plants from friends. My house was crammed with plants! I definitely had a green thumb. Then I moved cross country and gave them all away. Now I have 2 plants, one. inherited from my mom and one avocado tree I grew. Ha...you have to buy everything these days! I suppose I could buy some but I've been too stubborn.
I had a small 600 ft² home that was chock-full of plants. Every window had a hanging basket. My tiny living room had a couple of huge floor plants in it, as did my bedroom. When I first got into house plants, I would write their binomials on popsicle sticks and put them in each pot so I could learn a little. It was interesting to see the variety within related the same family...heck, I just read that there are ±30 genera in the prayer plant family alone! It's insane. I did a Club Med vacation on the island of Martinique, and did a rain forest tour. It's fascinating to see "house plants" in the wild...spider plants, bromeliads, dieffenbacchia, dracaena. As a weird side note, I had no problem with plants that were supposed to be "difficult," but I could not keep a rubber tree alive to save my life. Go figger...
weirder still, I started some arugula under lights because I can't find it in the grocery stores and I wanted to try it. Still too cold to put it outside and it is going to seed already.
@Mary Stetler are you leaving the lights on all the time? If so, that may be why your arugula is bolting already. Try planting again and put the lights on a timer so the greens only get 10-12 hours a day of light. Hopefully that will slow the bolting. Temperature can also be a factor with arugula. It can bolt if it gets too warm.
We still have a rose bush that's been with us for over 50 years and 3 moves. Shown below is a picture I took last year with the drone when I was learning to fly it.
I believe that COVID got a number of them into it. My friend who owns a greenhouse had a series of record months where he could not keep the stuff in stock. Lowe's was buying up inventory from local gardening centers to sell in the stores because their suppliers had sold out. I'm not sure it's eased up any. I plowed a huge garden but the critters here decimated everything...even with a 6 foot tall electric fence around it.
It took us some work but we managed to keep the rabbits out with chicken wire up to 18 inches high. Not sure you can find it now but it works great. We used welded wire then chicken wire connected to the bottom.Only thing we found that worked.
Here's the modern version: The ant works hard in the withering heat and the rain all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thought the ant to be a fool, laughed, danced, and played the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while he is cold and starving. CBS, NBC, MNBC, PBS, CNN, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so? Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper and everybody cries as they sing, ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green…’ ACORN stages a demonstration in front of the ant’s house where the news stations film the group singing, “We shall overcome.” Then Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Rev. Jackson, Rev. Sharpton join together and have the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper’s sake. President Obama condemns the ant and blames President Bush, President Reagan, Christopher Columbus, and the Pope for the grasshopper’s plight. Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid exclaim in an interview with Larry King that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share. Finally, the Congress drafts the (EEOC) Economic Equity & Anti-Grasshopper Act, retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the Government Green Czar and given to the grasshopper. The story ends as we see the grasshopper and his free-loading friends finishing up the last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he is in, which, as you recall, just happens to be the ant’s old house, crumbles around them because the grasshopper doesn’t maintain it. The ant has disappeared in the snow, never to be seen again. The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident, and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the now ramshackle--once prosperous & peaceful--neighborhood. The entire Nation collapses, bringing the rest of the free world with it.
Not yet. I also heard of putting peanut butter on aluminum foil and then wrapping that around the conductors. I was kinda One-and-Done when a couple of dozen plants got chewed down to the ground in just a few short days, and there were maybe 5 deer in the middle of the electrified fenced area as though I were a venison rancher. My next move is gonna be to install a perimeter fence about 3' outside the existing fence I believe that's the distance.) My understanding is that deer have poor depth perception and do not realize they can easily jump both. But I gotta clean it up first...things are overgrown.
My lowest strand is not far above the ground. My problem was with deer jumping the fence. What's odd is my neighbor has a garden with a 4 foot non-electrified fence around it, and they do not bother his stuff ever...from planting to harvest. Yet they vaulted my 6' electric fence to eat my brand new pepper and tomato plants.