Squirrels in our pants

The onslaught is coming one of these days. No doubt about it. The varmints are on their way.
But so far this spring, they haven’t attacked our garden paradise.
As usual, we bought off the birds with straw. A few years ago, the starlings and robins picked our pea patch clean before the plants had a chance to get very far out of the ground. With their beaks, the birds would snip off branches of young tomato plants, too, and carrry them off who knew where.
We couldn’t figure it out at first, and then we decided it had to be for nests. We were right. Because as soon as we provided another ready source of nest-making material, the thievery stopped
We started by piling up twigs. But setting out a bale of straw (only $6, and it lasts at least two seasons) was easier and really did the trick.
The birds now stop by and load up building material as if our back sidewalk was the loading dock at Home Depot.
As for the rabbits, we fence them out. With 1 by 2s and chicken wire, I built multiple fence sections that measure 8 feet long and two feet high. It took me a week to nail the sections together and stretch poultry mesh over them. That was a few years ago. Now each year I set them up in the spring and take them down in the fall for storage and maintenance.
How it goes together is I drive posts into the dirt every eight feet and wire the sections to them.
Like I said, it’s only two feet tall. Yet the rabbits won’t jump that high, and neither will they dig under the fence iif you leave a couple of inches of wire extending beneath the bottom crossbar of the fence sections. By covering that skirt with dirt and then letting the grass grow up into the mesh, the fence is practically impenetrable to bunnies.
Now as for the squirrels, that’s another matter. Still working on that one.
However, while doing some research on the subject for the book we’re writing on vegetable gardening, I looked up squirrels and plants on google and came up with this instructional video. Must have been a typo in the search line:
Posted by: Mike

Advertisements