Squirrels stripping maples of buds. I'm beside myself.
DCF-Z6A
4 years ago
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DCF-Z6A
4 years agoRelated Discussions
Do squirrels eat stuff in gardens?
Comments (45)This city is infested by grey squirrels. They use the city's electricity cables as a highway. Houses are densely built and there are some tall trees. Needless to say, we can't use any physical barriers as they can easily hop onto a tree, a fence or cables and just jump off to wherever they please. In my case, the worst is my front yard flower bed (I also have two five-storey high maple trees, so they feel right at home). I don't know why, but every time they make holes in the ground, they do it around the root balls. I wonder if it is because they want to munch on the roots (so far, they don't seem to actually have damaged the roots). They keep poking holes around my lavenders, and it really messes with my head, beause every time I feel happy that the lavenders are finally firmly rooted, they pull the earth up around them, and I have to keep patching it all up. They also bury and dig in the lawn, and I am quite puzzled at this, as the soil under my grass is rock hard (there is much softer soil nearby that they won't even touch). They never touched the crocus I planted in the same lawn, just under the trunk of the maple tree they live in. Go figure. The squirrels have stolen my watermelons (and left the carcasses all shredded up all over my plot). What really bugs me about this is that they don't actually eat the melons. They just tear them up into little chunks and then they leave. I find neat little piles of shredded melon. They have also eaten cukes, but not off the vine, though. They eat the cukes I leave out to dry them for seed. They seem to leave tomatoes alone. At first, I used the Havahart traps and I relocated them to a nearby park. I soon got fed up with that as they start really becoming numerous and quite motivated starting in midsummer. I just can't keep up with them and the trips to the park take up a lot of my time. There are also some super squirrels each year that seem to be smarter than the lot of them and that seem to want to simply destroy my garden just for the heck of it instead of just feeding, breeding and burying. So, I have started drowning them. Yes, I know, it is quite drastic, but that is the only efficient method I found, and honestly, in my neighbourhood, the squirrel population really needs to be controlled, and people add to that by feeding them for fun. Yes, I know, they just act according to their instincts and they have no bad intentions. But I am not going to live on a barren plot just so they can have their way. Besides, did I mention the entire city is infested by them? My family used to judge me for drowning cute little squirrels, but once they started seeing the damage, their disapproval melted away and all that was left was admiration for being tough enough to hold them under the water until they die (which, by the way, is quite quick and the squirrels don't even have time to panic as they die within a few seconds). For the flower bed, I am considering laying chicken wire disks around plants and covering that with the usual pine needle mulch I use. I will simply cut a foot square piece of chicken wire, cut into it up to the center and make a hole about twice the size of the plant's stem or trunk in the middle. Nobody would see them, but the squirrels would be stopped dead in their tracks. As for melons, next year, I will simply put the little melons in plastic cherry tomato boxes: they have little holes and let the sunshine in, and they are big enough that the melons can become large enough for the squirrel to find them too large to mess with before I need to remove the boxes. We'll see. I read that chicken manure supposedly keeps the squirrels away. I will start testing that as I have some pelleted chicken manure fertilizer left. I also read somewhere that daffodils are toxic to them, and sure enough, they don't ever go near my daffodils, so interplanting tulips and crocus with daffodils may be a good idea. I would gladly use a rifle, but living in Canada, that is not a possibility. So, I will mainly just keep drowning them until the city implements their squirrel control policy, which better be soon....See MoreSo I'm sitting next to an Evelyn bloom...
Comments (25)Hi everyone! What a very pleasant thing to read about such a lovely flower. I just got my first Evelyn bloom on a plant I bought mid-summer this year. The plants arrived right before a heat wave that almost fried them. The nursery I bought them from instructed me to pull off all the leaves so that the plants can focus on the roots and to give it a bit of shade when the temperature went above 90 degrees. I did as instructed and the plants came back very well. I was going to pull off all the new leaves again, but my husband wanted me to keep the second batch on. They continued to sprout new leaves...then buds...and then my one bloom appeared. Both plants are less than a foot tall and the flower is about 2 inches wide. Question 1 - I'm new to growing roses, so any advice would be helpful. At the moment I'm wondering if I should nip off the rest of the buds and try to get the plants to focus on their roots? We get snow here and I'm worried that these plants are too young to survive if I let the buds bloom. Question 2 - On a mature plant, how big do the blooms actually get? I can only find online sources that give the plant size, not the bloom size. Thank you and sorry for the long post....See MoreJapanese Maple Bark Problem.
Comments (8)Chicken wire loosely crumpled around the trunk is very effective as well. Allows the bark to breathe properly and almost disappears from sight!! Too bad it doesn't keep the deer away as well! The squirrel damage is usually something an otherwise healthy tree can handle pretty well. Unless they manage to strip all the bark off the circumference of the trunk....See MoreHow to deter squirrels
Comments (51)I’ll take the quail Diane…. lol they ain’t bad eating. Skinning squirrels is a job in itself so think twice before you blast one of them….. Anyone who has ever done it knows what I’m talking about…. suncoastflowers, a friend of mine saw a squirrel on a tree about 4 feet up from the ground. He walked towards the tree and the squirrel moved around behind it. Not thinking, my friend reached around the tree and grabbed the squirrel. You should have seen the hold he ended up with in his hand. A squirrel can chew hickory nuts open so their teeth are sharp..... as he found out....See Morewayne
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4 years agoken_adrian Adrian MI cold Z5
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