The squirrels/birds did not bother my yellow squash last year. They did love the tomatoes though. Someone else suggested they may have been going after the tomatoes for the moisture content, so this year I will have a dish of water for them away from the garden. The squash vine borer did go after my squash plant though.

I think I would wait on the cage covers for the first year and see what issues you have to overcome. Some folks have problems with Squirrels others don't. Squirrels in my yard will dig into any bare soil, on the off chance some other squirrel burried something good there. But they don't bother my tomatoes. But I have a bird bath. So in many cases, squirrels will eat tomatoes in the hot summer for the water content. Give them an alternative easier water source and they don't need your garden. One area I would cover now is any berries. The birds will definitely get more than you do if you don't keep them out.

Just my two cents.
Susan

Last spring I caged the whole garden with chicken wire when the majority of of plants were large I removed it Then for my successive plantings I used a 1'x1' cage made of wood with wire stapled to it, a lot like Mel,s only smaller. I liked them and think I made 8, I can plant seeds like carrots in a square next to a grown Pepper and The cage keeps the pepper leaves off the new plants until they can fend for themselves. In the fall I stapled plastic over the wire and used them for mini-cold frames. I had spinach over winter under the small frames. If you go this route 1x4 inch seems to work the best, cut them shorter than a foot square or they will not fit side by side.
First you can use the bare frame as a hi-rise, I did this with some carrots.
Second you can staple wire flat across or bend and staple a taller wire cage per Mel' book
Third the flat wire type make a great support for stapling clear plastic over for a cold frame.
fourth you can tell by the length of this post it is raining.

Curt~

Squirrels/Bunnies did not eat my zucchini last year and I did not have them covered. They did sprawl to one side over the edge of the bed though... which might be a consideration. The zucchini plant was brittle enough that if I had to push part of it back into a cage, it might have broken.

My hubby made a cage such as the one in Mel's book for one of my 4x4 beds. In that bed I put any type of green such as lettuce, spinach, chard, collards. I'm sure that bed would have been a salad bar for the local creatures had it not been covered by a cage. I did find that the plants around the edges of the bed were damaged due to getting caught in the chicken wire when I took off the cover.

I like Curt's 1'x1' cage idea. I may try that this year for some of my beds. A smaller cage would be much easier to handle and would allow for easier rotation of crops between beds.