Squirrel Deterrence
Cody H via pbs (Fri, 25 Dec 2020 11:59:28 PST)

Have you seen the squirrels in the act? If not, I wonder if it isn’t a
rat... I have been dealing with a similar problem, which in my case was
definitely a Norway rat that had discovered my winter growing bulbs in the
greenhouse and had been ransacking them, eating the fresh new leaves and
digging up the pots and scattering the bulbs and labels, consuming most of
them but leaving a few chewed in half here and there, or just yanking them
up and caching them under the tables in mixed piles so now I have no idea
what they are. Sigh. Years of babying these little bulbs, mostly grown from
seed, all shredded in a few moments by a rat. Apparently it favored the
Romuleas more than anything, followed by Gladiolus and Calochortus. Babiana
and Watsonia not so much, though it still apparently found some
entertainment in digging up and scattering even those bulbs it didn’t want
to eat. I finally caught it today after having set about 20 traps of
various kinds all around the zones of destruction, but it had continued to
ransack the pots for a couple of weeks before it started testing the traps
yesterday. It was a peanut butter-oatmeal mix in a powerful
metal-bar-under-tension trap that finally caught it. It had been burrowing
through the gravel under the edges of the greenhouse, so not much I could
do to prevent entry, since the entire greenhouse rests on a gravel pad. The
next greenhouse will have a concrete foundation, I think.

On Fri, Dec 25, 2020 at 10:42 AM John Wickham via pbs <
pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net> wrote:

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