You won't need to protect established bulbs. Squirrels only dig up disturbed soil. I only protect my bulbs immediately after planting. I do nothing the following season.

The amaryllid bulbs (narcissi, galanthus and Leucojum) do not need protection against any mammals due to their extremely bitter tasting and poisonous amaryllidaceaen alkaloids. On the other hand their bulbs are extremely prone to befalling with the small and big narcissus bulb flies. The incidence of this particularly amaryllophile pest is regionally very different and should be checked out carefully, BEFORE planting rare/expensive cultivars of daffodils or snowdrops. Hans-Werner

Hi, I'm new to gardening and wondering the same question. I am in a wooded area with assorted wildlife including voles, moles, squirrels, chipmunks, red foxes, bats, raccoons, turkey, and deer (and probably more I just don't know of yet). I am going to be planting an assortment of spring bulbs - crocus, hyacinth, daffs, tulips. I want to protect from underground burrowing as well as burrowing from the surface downward, primarily focused on protecting from voles but also squirrels and chipmunks. After much research I came up with mixed sentiment between 1/2", 1/4", 1" and bottom basket only vs full cage, with people vouching for each method. Owner of local pest control company told me that voles can definitely fit through 1/2" but I am concerned that leaves can't grow through 1/4" so I decided to go with a blended approach with the bottom of the cage made out of 1/4" hardware cloth and top out of 1/2" hardware cloth. Imagine one of those free gift boxes you get when you buy a sweater with the bottom part ~8" deep and the lid part ~1" deep. Going to sink the whole thing in the ground and throw in some Vole Scram (granular castor oil based repellent) plus some red pepper flakes for good measure (have a huge warehouse club tub of it anyway). Anyone with more experience have any input or advice? Much appreciated!!

Sorry, I'm bumping this because I realized I reposted about this. I think when people started making idiotic comments about my cell phone I stopped reading. Pharkus, help me to understand something. The center-tap pole transformer on the other side of the neighborhood has legs A & B or however they designate them that are at 120V w/respect to both [local] ground & neutral. These legs travel separately into everyone's homes, along with a neutral. At the very least, neutral again connects with ground in everyone's service panel, and, I believe, at several points along the poco line is grounded again just to be sure. (In other words, unlike in a home, ground for the power company is always supposed to == neutral. In a home, for safety reasons, they are only connected in the panel.) What I can't understand is how the status of my neutral can ever make a difference, other than a gross malfunction that would trigger a breaker to trip. I have a wire with 120V of potential. I have another with 120V offset by 180 degrees. It only interacts with the other wire at 120V potential in an appliance that is using both. (I was not running my clothes drier at the time and that's the only 240V device I have.) In other words, my panel is NOT a center tap transformer and every connection between a hot leg & neutral is through a resistive, circuit-breaker-protected appliance; the electricity will either return to neutral or return to ground. I can understand how either leg could drop below 120V due to a bizarre problem in the panel, but I can't understand how my panel or ground could make them unbalance with one going higher. Without some kind of transforming/regulating device to induce this imbalance, it seemed a breaker would have to blow in any imbalance scenario that originated locally. (i.e., anywhere downstream of the transformer) The "main breaker" is just a 2 pole breaker where, of course, the 2 poles are entirely separate but both either capable of tripping the breaker. Let's assume a scenario where the power company only sends out "hot" lines...I believe this is actually true in rural parts of the commonwealth like NZ or South Africa. Even then, if there's a bad point-of-use ground...yes...you would have a kind of a brown-out, because there wouldn't be a complete earth return to the generator. But I still can't see how the voltage can ever go higher unless something goes wrong at the point where it's split, i.e., the transformer. BTW, I also think the imbalance scenario is unlikely because nothing seemed to be over-voltaged. The entire house was browning out - or in the briefer over-voltage incidents, over voltaging. If I'd heard my ceiling fan speed up at the same time a light in the bathroom was dimming, that would have really freaked me out. IF this is too exhausting, feel free to just tell me "you're wrong"...and I'll check with my favorite PhD holder in electrical engineering the next time I talk to him. Update...I skimmed through this: http://electricalnotes.wordpress.com/2012/07/28/impact-of-floating-neutral-in-power-distribution/ But this is mainly talking about commercial 3 phase distribution. For the neutral beyond the transformer to have been the cause of my immediate-on, immediate-off 5 minute brownout, it seems I'd have to assume 1) my panel ground suddenly failed 2) all the power line's grounds suddenly saw high resistance to ground 3) all my neighbors ground-to-neutral connectors massively failed at the same time too 4) these events all occurred in perfect sychronicity. BTW inside my panel all 3 mainline connections looked good & tight (I didn't touch them to be sure LOL) and the ground connections looked tight too.