I don't think putting them in small pieces would keep the squirrels out. Chicken wire is intended to be put down when 'building' a flowerbed from scratch. You can clip holes in it if you want to put a larger plant here and there, but the more holes there are, the more squirrel entry points there are. Standard stakes used are landscaping staples (a big piece of metal bent in a U). If you want to put just a bulb here and there, bulb cages might be more what you are looking for. This is a chicken wire container about the size of a drinking glass, a tulip bulb is place inside then the whole container is planted. For crocuses you could use a sideways tube or box and put a row of 3 or 4 crocus bulbs in it.

Ok here's some more info then.....I've had a spider plant and it got covered in white fuzzy stuff (mealy bugs maybe?) and no matter how hard I tried I could not get rid of it and it died very fast...like in a couple of weeks. Well the plants on the east side of my house in the windows are about 1 foot from the window...maybe closer. I repot them in decorative pots with the holes in the bottom and the water catcher attached. I asked about the potting because I just can't believe every plant in my office has been in those black 10" things for 10 years, are no where near a window and they look great... I generaly water mine at home once a week. I try to water my rubber plant twice a week because that's what I have read and it's doing just ok but is growing towards the window like it's starving for light. My sheffelera (sp?) does best when I totally ignore it and maybe give it a tad of water once every 2 weeks. I can't seem to bring my corn plant back. New leaves turn brown every single day now. I'm at a loss. When my plants look sick, i put them at my back covered patio where they get a tad of morning sun and within a week they spring to life (except the corn plant). I dread having to bring them in this winter because they will sulk but usually survive ok in front of the west window. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I've killed something called a Tea plant (purplish leaves) spider plant, majesty palm(although the one i have now is happy on the patio in the sun) cactus, aloe vera plant, plenty of succulents (they hate me) I even killed a philodendron....2 of them. Maybe I do over water.....

Could be polygonum, not a tree or even shrub really. More of an herbaceous plant, but having, as you mention, quite fibrous stems. It is very agressive, spreading by rhizomes-underground horizontal stems. Roundup will kill it, but it will take several applications, as new stems will continue to appear in new places for a while even after spraying. It sounds like you have little if any desireable vegetation in the way, which will make spraying it easier. There probably is another herbicide that will work faster, but Roundup will get it eventually, and is of very low hazard to the applicator and others who will use the area. +oM

Unless the parent tree was own root the sucker yours came from is the sweet cherry rootstock and not the named cultivar that was presumably grafted onto it. Either the rootstock seedling happens to be a yellow cherry as well or the whole parent tree, including the roots was the yellow cultivar. Sweet cherry is actually a weed species in this region and suckers to form groves on local wooded hillsides, where it even overtakes and overtops the native red alder trees often present in quantity on the same sites. It also crosses with the much less exuberant, native bitter cherry to produce a nearly fruitless, intermediate hybrid called Puget cherry. Some ~tall examples of the latter are conspicuous when in bloom, on undeveloped land between I-5 and Lakeside School (near Seattle). It is usual to have problems with suckering and bony surface roots with plantings of sweet cherries - perhaps all the more so when these are present as rootstocks for Japanese flowering cherries. All you can do is uncover the bases of the suckers and saw them away. If there are horizontal runners that lead back to the original planting follow these back to the parent tree and saw them off at their points of origin, pull the rest up. You don't, of course want to saw off normal roots of the parent tree - just the ones that are suckering runners like aspen trees and running species of bamboos produce. This post was edited by bboy on Sat, Mar 15, 14 at 17:05