We’ve not had rain for a week now, and the little trees need watering. My helper friend was here on Thursday so we decided to try to get the drip hoses run.
We had a couple problems to solve first. One was all this stuff had been piled into the garden shed over the winter and we couldn’t get to the hoses, hung on the back wall. So we had to hoe out the shed first.
The next problem was if we put the hoses down first, they’d be in the way of getting the cages down. So we decided to make cages after we’d hauled all the hoses out to test them. The hoses never got tested…
Because the maple was in the open area we were going to work in, its cage was made first. I had lots of partial rolls of coated garden fencing I’d squirreled away and we used up the ones in the garden shed first.
We measured across the area to be fenced for a diameter, and then unrolled the wire in a circle until it measured the right size across the top. The diameters ranged from 2’ to 3’ 6”.
Some cages only needed the 3’ high fencing, like this Juneberry. The maple and taller trees got the 4’ fencing.
The tallest and widest cage we made was 6’ high x 3’ 6” wide for this peach tree. We cut a length in half lengthwise and fastened it to the bottom edge of the fence.
We ran out of wire and had to go to the barn for another roll. There were 6 of these in the back pasture at 10AM. This is why we are making cages…
My helper friend made the nice neat fasteners you can see on the bottom section. The messy ugly ones are mine. My hands don’t have the strength to make tight ones.
We used 2 stakes and wired each cage to them for stability. The giant peach cage will get 4 stakes.
There were 12 cages to make and we got them all done. We also got 1 of the lengths of poultry netting down and the garden shed put back to rights.
My helper friend will be here on Friday and we will test the drip hoses and get them laid out around the little trees. We’ll take down the last of the netting as I hope the cages will be sufficient protection from the deer. The netting will be needed in early June when the chicks go out on pasture.
Once the drip hoses are in place, the last job will be to mulch with wood chips around each tree.
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Thank you!
I am jealous. I live in an apartment complex so I do not have an area where I can plant trees. This makes me very sad because I am a tree hugger.
I do plant flowers in front of my apartment though. I just planted some Petunias, but I am not sure how they will do as we just had frost the other day right after I planted them.
Thank you for sharing your process with making these tree cages. You can thank @pennsif for me being able to find this great post as I was directed to it thanks to his Sustainablity Curation Digest.
I do feel for people who can not plant nice gardens. At least you have room for some flowers. I hope they survived the frost.