After having most of my plastic Christmas balls and lights eaten by squirrels from my outdoor Christmas tree I can say that they will eat anything. Oh, they also chew clumps out of my hydrangeas and caragana trees. They also ate a piece of one of my plastic solar lights that I have on a fence, many tulips bulbs and even hyacinth bulbs even though they are supposed to hate them. Last Summer they ate 18 unopened buds from my rose plants and dug out a lily plant, ate the bulb and then left with the whole plant (!!!). I have security cameras around my place and I saw that they were the ones who ate them. I'm in Canada zone 4b. They didn't die after eating all that as I can still see them around. Last year I tried many things to repel them that I found online, from cayenne pepper powder, moth balls (they ate some of them!), ground coffee to even urine and nothing helped. This year I'm trying something that I came up with on my own, which is powder garlic. It's been working so far. I already saw some of them sniffing it and leaving without causing any damages.

I have lived here for 18 months (the woods of West Hopkinton, NH) and have never seen a rabbit - we have so many predators that eat rabbits (fox, fisher cats, hawks) - that's probably why. I do have lots of squirrels, and chipmunks too. anyway, would a rabbit rip the branches off and not eat them? i'm so confused... oh - by the way - you might be able to see in the second picture - there is some protection around the trees - I have 5 foot green metal fenceposts in a square, with fishing line strung around them at varying heights - this was supposed to try to keep the deer out: i was told that the deer don't see the fishing line, bump into it, get scared, and run away. However, it hasn't stopped the deer from munching on some of my apple trees - but that's not what's happening here. a raccoon/rabbit could definitely get under my fishing-line defenses.

Lucky, That was me who did the Bon Bon test. I wholeheartedly agree a test of one experimental specimen and one control is not conclusive. However, my thought is it's better to draw a conclusion from a test of one than a field test where the causative effects of the test are even more spurious. I'm thinking of "water witching" as an analogy. People swear by it and stories abound how so and so drilled a well an there was no water then so and so witched for water and "voila" the well that was witched was a gusher. It's not a completely fair comparison because there may be some science behind the possibility Bon Bons poison squirrels, whereas there is no science behind water witching. But my point is the means of observation is the same and tells us even less I think than an experiment with one "n" and one control. To me, there seems to be other supporting evidence that Bon Bons don't work. I've read some cases of suicide attempts with Plaster of Paris (human attempts, not squirrels) and it took fairly large amounts of Plaster of Paris to cause gastric blockage, and they ate it straight. I don't recall anyone actually died from it because the pain was so extensive, they sought medical treatment. Additionally, there was someone on this forum who posted he placed rat bait around his orchard and found numerous squirrel carcasses afterward (if memory serves, it was something like 13) from eating the bait, which is something that seems to be missing from the Bon Bon accounts. I'm not advocating one way or the other using rat bait for squirrels, just commenting that there is a significant difference between the two accounts. If some credible person were to report the same results with Bon Bons as has been reported with rat bait (i.e. large numbers of carcasses) then I would definitely re-think my opinion of the possible efficacy of Bon Bons. However, as it stands now I suspect not only are Bon Bons safe from secondary poisonings, but safe for squirrels as well. I do wonder if there could be some conditioning effect with the use of Bon Bons. There is a lot we don't know about squirrel behavior. Is it possible Bon Bons give the creatures enough of a belly ache that they avoid feeding in that area thereafter? Sort of like an electric fence can condition livestock? I don't know.

Yummy! There is nothing better than eating a ripe peach, still warm from the sun, standing there in the yard with juice dripping down your chin. I can't say I blame you for not being able to wait a couple more days to eat the first one. I am the same way every year with the peaches and plums Our first plum tree and our peach tree already are bare of fruit, but we're still getting plums off the second tree. This is the earliest we've had fruit ripen/finish up. Usually we are just starting to get plums now, about a week before Father's Day, so we're always picking them right around Father's Day, and the peaches start a week or two after the first tree, and the second plum tree and the wild plum trees are a week or so after the peach tree. Everything is early this year. Our peach tree is on its last legs and we're going to cut it down now that the fruit is done. We planted two replacement trees for it this year. I let the squirrels have most of the peaches because they were so small. Tim thinned the peaches, but since the fruit ripened a month early, he apparently didn't thin them early enough to get a decent size on the remaining fruit. We did have to fight the coyotes, deer, squirrels and rabbits (they devour fruit the wind blows off the trees) for every plum, but the birds didn't bother the fruit at all this year. Maybe that's because they're busy with caterpillars and grasshoppers. You can tell it is stone fruit season here because Wal-Mart is pretty much out of pectin, jars and labels unless you happen to walk in the door just after they've unloaded a truck and restocked the shelves. I know the weather/gardening ups and downs must drive Wal-Mart management crazy. Last year all the stores had huge amounts of pectin, jars, etc. that didn't sell because of the drought. This year the demand is huge, and at least so far, they do not have a steady supply to meet the demand. So, fruit season's been in full swing here for maybe 3 or 4 weeks now, and cucumber season has hit because the pickling spices are disappearing off the store shelves. It is interesting to watch how it ebbs and flows over the years. Just by watching the supplies on the canning aisle, you can tell when folks are having a good year....or a bad one.