Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Some cheeky bastards are stealing from my garden!

Rooftop Container Garden Pest

Damn squirrels, they've finally discovered the rooftop vegetable garden.  They ate one of my last 2 tomatoes that survived the tornado and a bunch of my cherry tomatoes.  They haven't touched the peppers or eggplants yet.  Oh well, at least it's the end of the season.  I have a while to think of some preventative measures for next year.  If anyone has any suggestions I'm all ears.

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9 comments:

  1. This was an everyday occurrence for us this month. All of the sudden they were gobbling on all the end of season tomatoes.
    http://nycgardening.blogspot.com/2010/09/dear-squirrel-this-is-war.html

    I was thinking about how to prevent this, but it seems weird to put netting all the plants. I tried putting cayenne pepper near the plants but that didn't help. A blogger told me to put bowls of water near the garden. She said that squirrels sometimes eat tomatoes to get water.

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  2. If all they eat are tomatoes and nothing else that's not too bad. It would be -really- annoying if they ate everything in the garden.

    It's been pretty rainy recently so I doubt the water thing would apply in this situation.

    I'll keep the hot pepper thing in mind. I intend to grow cayenne peppers next year anyway.

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  3. I just remembered I never replied to your comment about the chickens that in-laws raise. I asked them and they brown and white plumed chicken is a Dominique.

    http://www.dominiquechicken.com/

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  4. They've been eating my tomatoes the entire summer. I estimated that I lost about 20 tomatoes from my two plants. I got ticked off enough to cover all the plants in mesh. That seemed to help. They haven't been interested in the sweet peppers either.

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  5. After some googling I've come to the conclusion that squirrels will not eat any kind of pepper, sweet or hot. Both are too spicy for their palette. I couldn't find a definitive answer on whether or not they like eggplants, but their preference for sweet stuff makes me assume that won't be much of a problem.

    I'm willing to share tomatoes but all future cantaloupes will be strictly off limits!

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  6. Luckily, I have been spared animals eating my plants this year. The squirrels are more content to -dig- in my planters than anything else. A little lost soil isn't much to cry over.

    I've seen some interesting solutions online about people keeping animals out of their garden. I'd be inclined to set up a motion detecting sprinkler system. Wonder if that would work. I'm sure there's a low-budget version out there.

    Sorry for the late comment. Just now getting to my Google Reader feed :-D

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  7. Hi Ben, I blame this entirely on that tornado. I never had a problem until the storm knocked down all those trees. My guess is it lost its nearby food source and went looking around for another. I'm testing a hot pepper spray right now, hopefully it works.

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  8. Hi I live in Brooklyn as well and had squirrel problems all summer (they would take a bite out of a tomato and then just toss it), eggplant (they would eat huge chunks), watermelon (they bit the tiny melon off the plant and then just toss it somewhere), the gourds would be bitten on top AND bottom. I tried to make a solution of black pepper, curry powder, onion and garlic and it worked until it rained. Next spring, I will try to build some kind of chicken wire contraption, planting marigolds (squirrels don't like them). I also heard that the squirrels don't like vinegar, so I will be soaking old rags in vinegar. Hope you have better luck next season!

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  9. Hi Jen, thanks for all the ideas. I'll add them to my growing list of options.

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Thanks for sharing your thoughts!