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.

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Hi Jennifer, This is a couple year old thread! I haven't had any more significant trouble since that year, '09. I have to say, tho, that your recommended diversionary tactics would probably not work too well--in my experience! When I moved into the place I lived before this house, less than two miles from here, I found that a whole bunch of very cute and entertaining little squirrels came with the house! I hadn't had squirrels for YEARS before that--no established trees--and I was absolutely loving watching them! Started feeding them on the patio so I could watch them real close! More squirrels came! Then I started feeding the birds! Uh-oh! The squirrels ate the stuff I put out for them---and then ate the stuff I put out for the birds! Sometimes they STARTED with the stuff I put out for the birds, and then ate the stuff I put out for them!!! My first solution was to move the squirrel food and the bird food further apart! The squirrels laughed at me!!! I finally stopped putting out the squirrel food and tried to PROTECT the bird food. That stuff is expensive! Too late! I had LOTS of squirrels by then, and they were NOT going away! I spent the next eight years trying to outwit the squirrels! I LOST! I moved! So as far as I'm concerned, anything you do to make the squirrels think they're welcome is a really bad thing to do! And, crushed or not, a squirrel is gonna scarf down a dish full of peanuts in about five minutes. They are VERY good at eating! ;-) I'm lucky here that most of the neighbors have dogs, and I only occasionally have a squirrel show up! They do come to bury things in my perennial beds along the back fence, mostly over winter, and while I don't usually see them, there's no doubt that they come because every spring I find a couple scrub oaks coming up along with the perennials! I've found other "trees and stuff" coming up out there too on occasion--definitely not planted by me! I don't remember anymore what species it was, but I found some other kind of oak coming up out there one year and dug it up and gave it away at a swap! Find peanuts buried out there too! I do still feed the birds, but I mostly only feed safflower and thistle anymore, which the squirrels don't like, and when I do have black oil sunflower out there, if I even see one on the fence looking at the bird feeders I'm out there in a flash with my 6' garden stake--suggesting it leave! They sometimes show up when I have suet out there in winter too, but I have a Blackbird Dispersal System hooked up in winter to keep the blackbirds at bay, and it works pretty well at "dispersing" the squirrels too! And no cats for me anymore, unfortunately! In the last 4 or 5 years I've developed an allergy to them! After being god mother to the first, and mother to the second of the two feral kitties we adopted while I was at Paulino's, I can't get anywhere near them anymore! If you have a rabbit, I'm kind of surprised they don't pig out on things like lettuce and carrot tops, but your critter situation probably does help a lot--and, being out in the boonies, they probably have enough grazing land that they go for the easy pickin's! But thanks for the thought! :-) TERRI, I have seen upright sedums that were totally infested with aphids a couple times, but aphids, while they can make the leaves/plants look REALLY bad, they don't actually eat the whole leaves--just sorta suck on them! So aphids are definitely not what did the damage. I've never had rabbits, so I don't know if they like sedum or not, but I am almost positive it was the squirrels that were eating my stuff when I started this thread in '09. As near as I can tell, squirrels are completely random in what they choose to dine on. The year they got mine it was the same as what you described, plants on one end gobbled up, and that same thing on the other end left completely alone. The end of my yard where they/it tends to show up (AND bury things) is the end where they can most easily access my yard without drawing the attention of the neighbor dogs--so that could possibly be why they decided to "eat there" in '09. Will never know for sure! If it is a squirrel that's eating your sedum, there's really not much you can do about it but hope it decides to go looking for greener--or better stocked--pastures! In my experience, chances are that it/they will move on and leave your plants along. If it's a rabbit that's chowing down, you should be able to protect the plants with something like 1" chicken wire, securely fastened down to the soil so they can't get under the wire--tho that would undoubtedly detract from the appearance of your garden!!! But from what I've seen, when they find something they like, rabbits will keep coming back until it's gone! (When I was at Paulino's we had rabbits in the perennial growing fields! They'd eat whole flats of the different Dianthus all the way down to the roots!) Let us know if you figure out for sure what it is, and how your plants are doing! and, welcome to RMG! Skybird

Milton: My husband claimed that at uni, he reached a detente with a family of racoons by giving them part of his sandwich. The family (it's always three of them with the creepy grunting in the dark at night) we now have in the yard do not seem to bother anything, not even the vegetable garden. However, I did have to boot them out from under my wood shop using---sit down for this one---bars of Irish Spring soap shoved generously throughout. The odor is unbearable even to me; and they are more sensitive to it than I am. If that had not worked, I was prepared to drill holes into the floor boards and empty bottles of the same rancid cologne/fragrance oil thing that the vet recommended for my cat who is allergic to bug bites. The substance is so vile to my sinuses, I would have needed to put on my respirator mask just approaching the shop. Kev: Yikes. They like a lot of stuff. We have squirrels here, too, but the brown ones but they only topple pots and do not seem interested in anything I am growing. Also, the tree guy once counted 4 walnut trees and 6 oak trees growing around our property so they scoff at my plants. So caging is not an option? Or drones.