I will be living in Albany/North Shore/Auckland area. I have lots of young trees and plants that I will be planting and I am concerned I will loose everything to possums. What is safe and what should I try to protect (and how!) Especially of concern are papayas (still seedlings) and citrus trees (about 1 meter).
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Your council should have possum traps available or can get them for you. Put an apple inside with some cinnamon and they will die happily not knowing what hit them!
My Dad use to tie gorse (make sure there are no seed heads on it) around the truck of the trees, possums do no like to climb over the stuff (who does??) it did stop them from climbing into the trees. Maybe you could use it as a thick mulch if the trees are two small at the moment???? I'm not sure if the second part would work just an idea. I'm sure that any farmer would be very happy for you to take as much as you wanted.
It depends on where exactly you will live, as to how many possums you will get.
There are lots of options to keep possums at bay from simply netting the trees to keeping a dog to actively killing the possums if you feel that is ok with your philosophy.
Also possums will not eat everything, they do have preferences. They will for example eat the skin off your lemons and leave the skinned lemon hanging on the tree. They prefer to eat parsley and endives to cabbages and leeks. They will eat the whole apple tree, especially the young shoots in spring but leave the figs alone most of the time (you will be battling the birds for fruit there).
So possum control can be done in various forms - depending on your inclinations there are lots of options.
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There are lots of options to keep possums at bay from simply netting the trees to keeping a dog to actively killing the possums if you feel that is ok with your philosophy.
Also possums will not eat everything, they do have preferences. They will for example eat the skin off your lemons and leave the skinned lemon hanging on the tree. They prefer to eat parsley and endives to cabbages and leeks. They will eat the whole apple tree, especially the young shoots in spring but leave the figs alone most of the time (you will be battling the birds for fruit there).
So possum control can be done in various forms - depending on your inclinations there are lots of options.