The roots grow right through them, they don't cause a problem. I've never planted anything with a gopher cage though. Not worth the trouble to me. Overplant a little or use cinch traps or the like and get rid of the gophers.

Sara is right, the roots grow right thru. I do understand the need for the cages tho'. I had to use them for a lot of plants... or quickly no plant. I actually ended up using huge pots and water troughs as planters for all my vegetables; it was the only way I had anything to harvest; and even then it was a fight with the above ground critters.

We always grow EVERYTHING we can in gopher cages, and the roots grow right through. We live in a land of gophers. LOL! We even bought some of those sensors that make sounds that drive gophers, voles, etc nuts. We just had a gopher tunnel right next to the noise maker. We get lots of tomatoes, gopher cage or not. No experience with dragon fruit. You almost have to lay hardware cloth on the ground around fig trees, because the gopher's will go into the cage from the top. Sigh.

We've actually used the sound emitters for several years with great success!

We always used hardware cloth on our raised beds (about 6-8"), but had gopher mounds all around the beds. We started using the SE (sound emitters) and after about 2 weeks, they were gone. At the time we were using battery operated ones, and when the batteries went dead, back they came!

We are now in town, and our first spring were noticing some gopher mounds popping up around the neighborhood. We got our first mound and went and bought a couple. Within 2 weeks......gone!

New neighbors said heir back yard was full of the buggers, we suggested SEs and within 2 weeks they were gone!

Now we have noticed that most of the neighbors have them and are gopher free, where as a few blocks away they are riddled with them!

We get the solar ones from Harbour Freight for about $10 and the latest are going on 3 1/2 years! Good luck and happy gardening!