Tree Shelter Cages for Streamside Plantings Protect Trees

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- Hello, everyone.

My name is Tyler Groh.

I'm from Penn State Cooperative Extension and we're here today at a streamside tree planting.

We're gonna be talking today about these metal cages around these trees.

So at our tree planting, we wanna protect the trees and shrubs that we planted here that serve as a buffer for the creek itself.

So a lot of times when we think about tree shelters, our minds automatically go to those green plastic tubes that everybody's got around their planted trees.

Today we're gonna talk about sort of a alternative method, which is this metal tree cage itself.

You can see here that this metal is basically like any old garden fence wire that you could buy at a local hardware store.

It stands about five feet tall and it's about 12 inches in diameter.

So it's a cylinder that's wrapped around the tree itself.

To protect the tree from wildlife, such as mice, voles, bears, deer, things like that.

Everything that wants to nibble on our tree planting.

You can also see as part of this unit, there is a plastic tree tube that stands about a foot to two feet tall, sometimes on the ground itself.

That's to protect the base of the tree from those mice and voles that may wanna nibble at the base and kind of girdle your newly planted tree.

It's only so tall so that way mice and voles do not nest inside of there for wintertime 'cause they will not be as warm as they would be in a taller plastic tube.

Another component to this apparatus is this wooden stake that you could buy at any hardware store or nursery, as well as these zip ties that hold the metal cage to the wooden stage so that it is firm in the ground and can fully protect our trees from outside wildlife.

(birds tweeting)

So once again, what we talked about in today's video is this new alternative method to protect recent tree and shrub plantings, called the metal tree cage.

This tree cage can protect the trees and shrubs from wildlife that may wanna nibble away at our plantings.

And hopefully, if you use these in your own property, you'll have as great of success as we did at this planting, which happened about a year ago.

You can see here, the tree's doing very well with a strong leader and even some great side branches that will continue to grow until it becomes a mature tree.

Thank you so much for listening.