Shoulder has been bothering me. Got the tree in late. I didn’t feel like pounding T posts today. I put up a temporary deer fence and will finish it another day. Fence is 16-1/2 feet long 4-foot tall, welded wire fence. Rebar, garden staples or long spikes are good to keep it in place. Don’t know if it does any good, but I put flags on it to keep the deer from running into it in the dark.
This works well. Right now I have very similar set-ups around a dozen young trees. And I’ve used this approach before with success. If you need to delay the construction of a permanent fence, consider 6’ fencing and eventually a wider diameter. Obviously you don’t want the deer to have access to foliage if it merely lifts its head over the fence and leans in.
The end-state can be either a big linear fence enclosing multiple trees or simply unfenced tall trees where the scaffolds are out of reach (as in the background). I use the former for my apples, the latter for chestnuts, mulberries, peaches, plums, some persimmons. If you go for tall, use hardware cloth around the trunk to protect against rubs. And buy a ladder.
p.s. My comments above are focused on the cylindrical design. Your square fence may be OK too but I should note that I’ve often had deer (and woodchucks and raccoons, etc) go under a fence if there is any gap between the fence and the ground. I’ve seen a doe go under a fence (similar to your 2nd picture) at a full gallop.
When it is finished it has one section that has a door that is closed with a zip tie or two. I cut the zip tie and open the door. When tree gets big enough to be deer proof, I take it all down. When cage is set semi-permanently, I use stainless wire ties to hold up the fence. Zip ties degrade and every couple years they break and need replacing. But I use plastic zip ties to get it set up initially, then eventually replace them with wire, with the exception of the swing door.
As far as the small animals, I trap or poison them. The temporary deer protector is just used for a few days or a couple of weeks at the most. When I was younger, I’d plant a couple of trees and pound all the T posts and set up the cage that day. Now that I am old, it is getting tougher to do all at once.
Another issue is my soil is full of rocks. That tires me out. Not just rocks naturally occurring. I put down about 2 - 3 inches of rocks on weed barrier in some of the places I’m planting trees on. So, it all takes its toll when you are old. BTW, the rocks and weed barrier did not good. Grass grew right over it.
I wish I did have a tall fence and didn’t have to deal with this all. But I don’t. I’d need an 8-foot fence, or two smaller fences spaced apart. The deer we got here are crazy!
My trees have the same setup as @Zone6 (round wire cage) and t-posts for big round cage. I use the giant heavy duty yard staples to hold a small round cage - don’ t have any small rebar laying around!
cage goes all the way to ground - no tube around base of tree. I go into the enclosures regularly for pruning, training, weeding, etc. So mine are closed by two short pieces of wire that I twist around the top and bottom of the “door” part of the cage.
It’s kind of a pain to untwist x2 but I only put one twist now and just having one wire tie wasn’t enough.
Here’s an example of mine. It’s a seedling Chinese chestnut. I planted it a year ago. It’s been inside this cage ever since.
The fence is 6’. Within the next month, I’ll widen the diameter so the tree can grow without deer chewing the branches. I’ve got two older ones that went through this routine, starting 10 years ago. Now the trees are 25’ tall and wide, with no fences.
