Digger’s 1-Gallon Heavy-Duty Wire Basket - Gopher Wire Basket for Perennials & Vegetables (12 Baskets)

Great product if you have goofers eating the roots of your plants.

We are getting more of the best gopher cages on the market. Oh, they are a little tough to bend into shape, but the strength and long life are well worth the effort. We've been well pleased with these for many years, just putting more plants in that need protection from our aggressive and hungry gopher population.Recommend very highly!

Nice to have them premade instead of making them yourself from a roll of aviary wire. Little pricey though considering a roll of 36" x 100' aviary wire runs about $100 and you can make about 75 from one roll. But it saves a lot of time and bleeding sore fingers instead of putting together these baskets from scratch.

We had a large project, with 24 1-gallon star jasmine plants to plant to start a ground cover in an area freqented by gophers. Considering the cost of the plants and the hired labor to install them, the extra five bucks per plant to protect them is well worth it.You make similar baskets more cheaply starting with plain chicken wire, but not after considering the cost of labor, especially in California. Using my own free labor, I was able to form/shape two dozen of these into ready-to-plant baskets in an hour, while watching something on TV.

Easy protection for new plantings!

These are some of the only gopher baskets that seem to stand the test of time. I have purchased many from this company over the past few years and the original ones are still in good shape. I would recommend these baskets.

So I planted four tomato plants from sewn seedlings, and watched them grow nicely, develop tomatoes, nearly ripen, then one by one they died suddenly. I would come out in the morning to find vole mounds near the tomato plants and each day one plant would have its stem severed at the soil line, clearly eaten from below as there was a vole mount immediately underneath it.I also had 5 (out of 9) large artichoke plants literally disappear overnight with vole mounds all around them. They would disappear randomly over about a 6 week span. At this point, it was war!I tried sonic buzzers first, after the first plant died. The voles laughed at them, I have a picture of a vole mound 4 inches from the buzzer, must have been curious, or maybe looking for the off switch, I tried planting garlic all around, I hear garlic repels gophers and voles and such. Didn't help at all. I tried traps, I caught one vole, but the mounds all around the traps kept appearing. I tried stuffing lit roadside flares into their holes. Thats seemed to work, for a month or so, then more artichoke plants disappeared and I knew they had come back. Finally I tried poison in traps. The vole mounds continued to spread, but they never ate any bait, so I removed them as useless.Finally I re-planted tomatoes and artichokes in these baskets. The vole mounds kept appearing, all around the bed, but not a single plant was taken. The tomatoes grew large and bore fruit, no apparent impediment to their root systems. The artichokes have all grown to full size and just started bearing fruit.I used 1 gallon baskets for 1 qt transplants, so while the hole I had to dig was bigger than the root ball, I usually do that anyway to add amendments to the soil around the plant, so these baskets didn;t add a lot of work to the planting process. And with 6 foot tall tomato plants, and a mature 4 foot wide by 3 foot tall artichokes, these 1 gal baskets are clearly not inhibiting growth by pinching the roots. But despite vole mounds all around still, the plants are not being taken in the middle of the night anymore.Victory is mine!

Got these to protect new hostas from voles, which have destroyed my expensive plants in the past. These should work, but they arrive as a flat, envelope-shaped piece and need to be bent and formed into a basket shape - and they're quite sturdy, so it's not simple task. Strong hands and a pair of leather gloves are useful, as the wire will wear into your hands by the time you've shaped a couple of these.I found that if I bent the metal side bars 90-degrees about 3" to 4" up from the bottom (and in opposite directions) it made it much easier to form the flatter bottom of the basket. The instructions were unclear on this, and it does make them shallower, of course, but still pretty deep! You'll need to dig a decent sized hole for each, a few inches larger than the basket so you can backfill all-round with good, loose, supplemented planting soil.Forming them is a pain, but flat is really the only way they can be shipped cost-effectively, so allow some time to prepare them and they should do a good job for you. A quality piece, I think, worth the money.