I've got a ground rat (chipmunk) who's decided the new Iris bed I made last fall is a good place to make a new series of tunnels. I was hoping they were just "trial holes" but he disappeared into one hole and didn't come back up from that hole. This may be a stupid question but I'll ask anyway since I had to hack out clay soil and competing roots with an ax for days to make this bed. Will these chipmunk tunnels damage the Bearded Iris roots and, if so, far enough to kill them off? Do chipmunks nibble at the roots? The roots on these Iris aren't extensive yet since they were just divided last Fall. These miserable little "rats" already tunneled right for the Daffs I transplanted in Spring and my funky but delicate Allium Bulgaricum. The Bearded Iris are from stock well over 60 years old and I don't want to lose them to chipmunks who I used to think were cute until their population exploded this year. My father has many, many more that he's having extracted from weed infested landscape cloth in the next few weeks so I'm going to be dividing and replanting LOTS of these plants since they haven't been divided in almost 25 years. Needless to say, I asked him to have it done last fall so there wouldn't be so many thirsty/feisty critters about at that time who didn't have other fallen bird foods to satisfy them. It's not my house...I'm just the gardener... LOL. The critter problem is taking up a lot of time and plant material this year. If it's not deer, rabbits, groundhogs above ground then it's moles and chipmunks below ground. Sometimes I think it's just my bad planting, arranging, selection or protection until I read a thread like this and see most people have critter problems of one kind or another unless they have an entirely double fenced piece of land. Deer and rabbit resistant plant lists are a mean joke on new gardeners. Squirrels aren't getting much food from me right now since I had to stop ground feeding birds because chipmunks were taking it all. Maybe I haven't had a problem with them in the past since they had enough "hard stuff" with corn to file down their incisors when planting fall bulbs. I can only dream of having Lilies. Deer decimate them. The rabbits have eaten the gladiolus foliage in 2 new beds. Another case of my wanting to strangle them after having to take an ax to cement clay soil to plant bulbs...LOL.

i tried the cages that were in mels book but they didn't work. in my case it was raccoons that climbed on top and collapsed the cage. i finally built a fixed frame cage that seems to keep them out (so far) but the berries and melons aren't ripe so the jury is still out. they have worked on the deer so far though. i've live trapped and relocated more coons than i can count, but that's a tedious and time consuming job. so far, a 4 foot fence around each bed seems to keep deer out. it appears that they don't want to jump into a 4 foot wide bed over that fence, even though they could. i don't fence things like garlic and onions. at best, it's a constant war with the animals. i don't know what you do with the squirrels who seem to love tomatoes.

Believe it or not , I collect all the bluebonnet seeds and throw them around elsewhere but they keep coming up in the cactus garden where I WEED THEM OUT except for a few in the areas far from the cactus and other plants. Bluebonnets are good for the soil but they kill by smothering, other delicate plants like cactus. They were out HELPING me with weeding this morning. Lionel likes to roll in whatever I am pulling and paw at me for attention and games. George looks on. They are my somewhat wild cats that match my somewhat wild garden.

I saw that, and I'm concerned because two of my three cats are outside during the day. The third cat, Peachy, doesn't tolerate them, so it's easiest to handle it this way. The two come in at night, and one of them comes in occasionally when Peachy is hanging out in the attic. If I brought the two indoors permanently I'd have to sequester Peachy upstairs, which would be a royal nuisance. I'm considering it though. One of my in-and-out cats would love being indoors, although I suspect it would take a lot of adjustment for him to be in all the time. The other one can't wait to go back outside in the morning, so that's another story. The two cats mentioned on the news reside in different parts of NY State. I don't know where they are, but we're not far from NYS.