Rats vs rats
Rodger Whitlock (Mon, 06 Sep 2004 05:27:05 PDT)
On 2 Sep 04 at 22:27, Lee Poulsen wrote:
The squirrels on the other hand were a horrible problem. There were
pecan and oak trees in the neighbors' yards so they had plenty to
eat. They never ate any of my plants or bulbs. What they would do,
however, was pull the plants or growing bulbs out of the pots and
put an acorn or pecan in the resulting hole and leave the plant to
wither and die in the daytime sun. Apparently they were lazy
squirrels and didn't want to go to the trouble of digging holes in
the real ground! Each spring I still had to pull seedling oaks or
pecans out of various random pots.
I have the same problem with the squirrels here, but the nut mix is
acorns-and-filberts. The squirrels are very deft about inserting nuts
into pots: it's often impossible to detect any soil disturbance until
a seedling emerges.
Some of the filbert seedlings are from a proper nut bush next door,
others are from the native Corylus douglasii on my own property, but
I can't tell their seedlings apart; if I could, I'd pot up the native
ones for distribution.
For those of you with collections of potted bulbs kept in frames of
some sort, a screen or mesh cover will go a long way toward
preventing this kind of difficulty. Screen will also keep out flying
pests such as bulb fly.
--
Rodger Whitlock
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Maritime Zone 8, a cool Mediterranean climate
on beautiful Vancouver Island