My preferred method of protecting fruit trees is to wrap a 5 foot long by 4 foot tall section of hardware cloth around the tree held up by a t post opposite a bamboo pole.
here is a picture of one that was long overdue for weeding.
I recently found a flaw in this method.
My jujubes have grown much taller than the ring and after a recent storm I noticed a few of them flopped over and were not standing back up. upon closer inspection I noticed partial girding of the trunk as the top heavy jujubes bounced around in their cages during storms.
Another jujube that has a cage of chicken wire had less damage due to the nature of the smoother top edge of the chicken wire.
the worst damage pictured
To mitigate further injury I tried attaching the jujube to the t-post with a few zip ties to prevent it from bouncing around in the cage
This past weekend I pruned the jujubes to make them less top heavy and replaced the wire cages with tree pro tree protectors. as the trunks still seem very flimsy, I kept the t-post but moved them closer to the trunk.
I’m hoping there is no long term issues due to the damage sustained.
My Prime Ark Freedom blackberries came out of the same storm in worse condition, completely bent over the edge of their supporting cage. I zip tied the canes to a bamboo pole tightly and they seem to be ok and are now just flowering.
