Squirrels

Gail Turner.

Ground squirrels in this area go right thru the chain link fence.

I have never had a problem until this year and it is BAD!!!! We have woods around our house so we have plenty of squirrels. This year they are eating entire plants out of my garden, especially pepper plants. This is also the first year my husband hasn't been filling the bird feeders (not sure why) but I think that is partly to blame. We are actually going to start trapping them in live traps since they are getting so brazen. I thought of hardware wire on top of the gardens but I would seriously need $hundreds$ in hardware cloth to cover them all.

milaneyjane wrote:I thought of hardware wire on top of the gardens but I would seriously need $hundreds$ in hardware cloth to cover them all.

I started with the hardware cloth route, but it was SUCH a pain to try to make covers for everything in the garden and you're absolutely right, it's really expensive (I paid about $130 for a 100' roll). Having to lift the covers off and on to work was no bueno either. And then they just dug under it! Trapping them HAS worked; we haven't seen a sign of one since last week. We caught a total of 8 in the trap in the first 4 days and none since.

I have to say that as bad as I feel about trapping and killing them, it has been SUCH a relief to not have to make sure everything is covered and to not get so stressed about what damage was being done when I wasn't there. I even took the bird netting off of one of my beds and only have it, placed loosely, on the one with new sprouts. It was seriously making me crazy to have to try to close every little gap in the netting, etc. and then they'd still get in and eat my seedlings and dig everything up.

So I feel bad about dispatching the squirrels, but being able to take pleasure in the garden again has balanced it out.

I noticed a squirrel started digging under my compost pile, then the next day it took this off a trellis on a table top bed:



I found it about 10 ft away, near the new squirrel hole. The next morning I set the Squirrelinator and by noon the squirrel was history. I have left the trap set in the same place for 2 more days & no sign of any more squirrels. I won this round!

I also appear to have gotten rid of the ants that caused me so many problems. Nothing organic would even slow them down. I finally put Amdro Ant Block outside the beds and within a couple of days there were no ants to be seen and it has now been about 2 weeks and still no ants.

I'll have to keep the Ant Block in mind - I think they like the worm bins/farm I just set up outside and I definitely see them all over the garden, just not in any numbers.

Good for you on the squirrel! And thanks again for the recommendation on the Squirrelinator. We caught 4 the first day, 2 the next, then 1, then 1, and have not seen hide nor hair since (and it's been what, 2 1/2 weeks?). There *was* something still eating the plants - my honeydew vine had every single leaf eaten off, and the pumpkin lost some vines - but the electric fence seems to have scared it off for now. It's 2 wires along the bottom of the barrier fence but it would be easy enough to add more if they come back.

I was planting catnip today and there was a bunch of squirrel-buried corn in the dry potting soil I was using. I felt a little bad... but not as bad as I used to feel when I'd check on the garden and find a month-old seedling killed.