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Permalink Reply by Ian on May 11, 2008 at 3:32pm

I have a pair of red squirrels that live in my garden, occasionally we see others. They are a problem with my walnuts and always get more walnuts than we mere humans do. I don't have any way to conquer them but prefer to try and live in harmony with them - until I win!!!
They did break into our wine cellar last year but they only stored their walnuts in there which saved me the fuss of collecting them.

Ian

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Permalink Reply by Heather Wood on May 11, 2008 at 4:31pm

I now live in an area that has no squirrels (prairie dogs yes, squirrels no) but I used to have them in huge numbers in New York, and finally resorted to taking up my raised beds and putting chicken wire under them as well as over, so that the squirrels couldn't chew their way in from underneath. It was an awful job, and I hope your situation doesn't come to that. I tried all the remedies I heard about, without success. I was reminded of a gardening article I once read (can't recall any details) in which the author said "It is important to realize that all squirrels have IQs of 220. Assuming that yours is higher, you will have no trouble in defeating them." I have to add that one of my New York gardening neighbors did resort to eating them, and reported that they were delicious, so don't give up that solution too quickly ;-).

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Permalink Reply by John Walker on May 12, 2008 at 11:12am

CATS, we have three.
Last year was a bad year in KY because of the drought and many animals ate fruit just to get water. We had very few problems though.
In the absence of cats, I think I would give my son archery lessons and tell him to go 'hunt some meat"...
BTW the last sentence is TIC

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Permalink Reply by Penelope on May 12, 2008 at 11:25am

I have a friend who livetraps them in his yard, butchers and eats them (out of sight of his neighors). Says they taste pretty good. I think spit-roasting would be best, with a little lemon/rosemary BBQ sauce. I'm thinking of inviting him to bring his trap over to my house and harvest a meal or two.

And part of the problem is that two years ago the city cracked down on feral cats which were apparently keeping the population down, because they've experienced a population explosion of late.

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Permalink Reply by amy on May 20, 2008 at 12:53pm

I've read recently that in merrie olde England that they've started hunting the grey ones. (The greys were imported from the US by someone who thought they were cute...funny how anthropomorphization can disrupt an ecological balance!)

I also had a friend back in my hometown whose grandma was from Mexico. She used to send the boys out with bb guns or similar to get some squirrels. She fried 'em up and by all accounts they tasted about like dark fried chicken meat.

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Permalink Reply by Maya on May 13, 2008 at 10:58am

Our cat seems to have worked out some sort of agreement with the squirrels. I have seen them run up opposite sides of a big maple trunk, meet face to face in the branches, and both look the other way. A retired man across the way built his own squirrel trap and has a tally marked inside the back door: over 100 last growing season! That said, they don't bother my garden much; they prefer the free bird feed put out by all the neighbors. They also eat the pears that are too high for us to get to.

Now those woodchucks... At last count, there were five woodchuck holes in our less-than-1/4-acre lot. Isn't it great the way these kinds of posts always bring out everyone else's horrible rodent pest stories and no solutions? Maybe if we can get the woodchucks up into the pear tree...

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Permalink Reply by Valerianella on May 13, 2008 at 3:25pm

Penelope, be grateful it is only lovely cute squirrels that steal your produce (or dig it up) : ) , imagine those being rats ! That's what we have here and that's not very funny anymore. We started picking our pomegranates, peaches, plums,... unripe otherwise we wouldn't get any ! They even eat bitter oranges. And yes although we are vegan, we do kill them if we can, it's either them or us.

Ian, your post made me laugh. Make the squirrels work for you, that is really smart. I wish we would have squirrels like yours, picking walnuts really takes time in the autumn (we do have quite a few trees)

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Permalink Reply by Penelope on May 14, 2008 at 8:13am

I agree that squirrels might be preferable to rats, but the "cute" factor no longer exists for me after all the damage they've done. My friend with the live trap plans on bringing it by as soon as he gets back from bear hunting, a prey with a little more manly status than squirrels :-)

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Permalink Reply by Penelope on May 15, 2008 at 5:15pm

Today I haven't seen a single squirrel in my yard. It's making me feel a bit creepy since yesterday, they were running all over the place. And I don't see any fresh holes in the pots I planted freshly yesterday. I did dust the pots with cayenne pepper. One of the boxes looks like a bit of digging was begun, then abandoned because the pepper is disturbed. Could it be a squirrel got a miserable whiff of it and spread the word? Perhaps they're all taking a nap and will come out at sunset.

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Permalink Reply by Heather Wood on May 17, 2008 at 6:38pm

Just after I said smugly that there were no squirrels in my area, I was hit with a plague of plant-killing English sparrows. They tear up and eat all the tender sweet green things, taking all my green lettuce and baby pea plants for example, but leaving the brassier greens like arugula alone. I don't know where they learned this. I've always had sparrows and never had this happen, but I can sit on my back porch and see them at it. It's vey irritating. I guess I'm going to make chicken-wire row covers, but it's too late for the green lettuce this year. Interestingly, I grow a dark red romaine lettuce and they didn't touch that one, so maybe I can grow it for a few years before they catch on. Has anyone else heard of sparrows doing this?

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Permalink Reply by Penelope on May 17, 2008 at 8:47pm

Whirlygigs or other things that wave and rattle might scare them for a while. People made "scare crows" to actually scare birds, not just for fun, afterall. Flocks of starlings will eat a lot of grain in a field too, and finished off all my grapes last fall. It's the first year they discovered them. I took the chicken wire off one of my beds this morning because the onions were growing through it -- It's a risk. I hope I have my lettuce seedlings in the morning. "It's a jungle out here in gardening land!"

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Permalink Reply by Edie Frederick on May 19, 2008 at 11:12pm

Penelope, on a cross-country trip several decades ago some iowa relatives kindly demonstrated how they prepared squirrel one generation back, perhaps during the depression. A crack-shot uncle gathered half a dozen squirrels from the woods and dressed them out. Then our sainted great-grandmother put together her "famous" squirrel pie -- like a tasty Shepherd's pie, with vegetables and meat in a thick sauce between two flaky crusts. I would
imagine that the squirrels were baked before adding their meat to the pie. I was impressed that there were some children present when this favorite uncle dressed out the squirrels and they laughed nervously to see the little, naked carcasses. He would not let them laugh and spoke to them kindly & charismatically about treating all game with due respect -- and continued as he worked until they "got it" and adopted his attitude. I found that years later I had to do the same thing for the same reasons with my children and neighbor children when we were cleaning fish.

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