Yesterday evening out of the clear blue or was it black, came a thought that stopped my heart for a moment. Why do thoughts do that I don't know, nothing I was saying or doing was related to that thought. What popped into my head was I remembered when I first had my trees I wanted to make sure I didn't lose track of which was which so I made so tags that I attached to my trees with some fairly heavy copper wire. That was fine in the pots and when I first put them in the ground as the trunks were about 1/2" in diameter. I made some rings about 2 to 3 inches around and put them around the base of my trees with the tags on them. I later put some of those nice aluminum tags held by very light aluminum wire and forgot about the others as the writing on the tags had faded. I rushed out this morning at first light and start scratching away the mulch looking for those tags and more importantly the wire. I found all of them. Some were still loose around the trunk because the trunks hadn't grown a lot. On some of them I found them just like the worst of my imagination had been in my head all night. The copper wire was tight around the trunks and on some of them they were slightly imbedded. On some of those trees waiting until the end of the season would have meant that they would have been buried into the bark of the tree. Now I know that trees can survive such events but I do imagine it does nothing for the health of the tree and could possibly make it weak in that area to where it could be broken by strong winds. Anyway, I caught them all in time and all is well.
So let this be a warning to you that may not have thought of this problem or a reminder to you that might have such tags at ground level. I now moved my tags to the top of the trees at eye level if possible to make them easy to read. I'm thinking of making a sign post at each in ground tree with a little info about the tree and fruit.
"gene"