I used them for 10+ years on my apple trees… until one took out my best apple tree. As far as I can tell, it held enough moisture close to the base of the tree to enable some sort of borer to eat through the heart wood and kill off the tree. (Candidly, I don’t have much luck with apple trees in general but, when that one survivor died off, it was heartbreaking.)
I’ve since switched to the black plastic mesh ones other posters have shown and haven’t had any issues at all.
Outcome may have been different if I took the tree guard off in the spring and only added back before winter as some have recommended, but I left on year round.
Borers tend to eat the cambium and maybe vascular tissue on the outside of the trunk which can cut off transport between the roots and the top of the tree. This is usually what kills a tree. If the wound did not encircle the trunk at some point it might have been something else.
Nope, but I’m not sure of point of origin. I heard groups financed trips for people to search Asia for short season Indica back in the early '70’s when most stuff was from Mexican seed. By the time seed got to my hands it had been passed through quite a few people. Now Dutch and American breeders have developed stuff so strong that one of my clients had a plant’s flowers measured and it reached something like 34% THC! And that’s in NYS just a few miles from me where she grew it. My bud once won second prize in the High Times national contest, but I doubt it reached more than half that. If I could get some of those seeds from her I would grow a plant for my son. No legal worries.
Kentucky weed once brought me to that state when there was a Mexican crop failure back in '69. A Kentuckian I met in CA wanted to show off a genuween CA hippie to his friends (I kid you not) so I was there for a visit and helped him harvest some of the local garbage. He made quite a bit of money on that stuff that year- sending plastic coolers stuffed with it to CA, but I was just along for the free ride. The only way it got me high was if we cooked out the resin, but it wasn’t a very good high. Dried it on an old tobacco farm in a drying shed for that stuff. .
Sadly, the local hardware store no longer replaces screen themselves, they send it out somewhere so they no longer have the scraps. And the other nearly hardware store had a fire and will be closed for some unspecified time until they rebuild. Maybe I do want some plastic or something this year. I wonder if I have any left in the garage…
Ive been using them for about 25 years with no problems against bunnies and deer. Take them off for a clean, once a year and put them in for recycling when they go brittle