Pea Growing, 2022

[meadow]

Having a cat and a dog is a great deterrent to leave your yard alone.

So true! I had to laugh when I read this though. When we first moved here we had a Gordon Setter that bounded through my corn seedlings as only a gangly youngster can do. I miss having a dog.

 

[meadow]

I'm planting Retrija this year too! What a great thread meadow!

Small world!! What other peas are you growing this year? I remember seeing your trials from last year. Did growing in window boxes work out well?

 

[meadow]

no, but you may have to add some fencing and discourage them or hunt them. once they know where food is at then you've upped their desire to come back. if you feed birds or other animals on your property in any way other than growing flowers you're probably going to attract them. and, well, even growing flowers might also attract them (like sunflowers)...

I'm pretty sure they are nesting in one of our large evergreen trees.

Which begs the question, why have I never thought of harvesting pine nuts?

 

[meadow]

There was a walnut sitting on top of the grass mulch in my garden.

I think it is a message from the mob.

 

[flowerbug]

There was a walnut sitting on top of the grass mulch in my garden.

I think it is a message from the mob.

at least they are more civilized and it isn't a horses head in the bed.

 

[Zeedman]

There was a walnut sitting on top of the grass mulch in my garden.

I think it is a message from the mob.

Squirrels have hung pairs of walnuts from the top of my garden fence at least twice that I can remember. Presumably the message is 'you do know we can climb this. right?'. Yesterday I opened the front door to find a squirrel shelling a walnut on my front steps. I have yet to chase out the squirrel which has taken up residence in my small shed; when I closed off all entrances, it chewed a hole in the soffit... and on the house, they've chewed open much of the gutter topper. I often wish that I was not strongly allergic to cats, because I would love to adopt 5-6.

 

[meadow]

Yesterday I opened the front door to find a squirrel shelling a walnut on my front steps.

Now, that is cheeky!

 

[Ridgerunner]

I've been known to trap squirrels. I used a properly sized live trap and baited it with BOSS (Black Oil Sunflower Seeds). I'd put the trap at the base of a tree (so they are comfortable they have a quick escape route) and scatted a little BOSS around it, then put more BOSS on the trip plate. Using just two traps I once removed about 50 squirrels from my suburban back yard in a month. When I started it wasn't unusual for me to see at least five squirrels back there anytime I looked. As I trapped them new ones would come in from the surrounding back yards.

If I disturbed the soil, either planting something or just pulling a weed they'd dig a hole looking for a nut. And they were causing property damage, mainly chewing up the flashing around my roof vents for the salt in it. There were just too many. I eventually thinned them down to manageable numbers.

It's probably illegal to release them anywhere except your own property and probably illegal to kill them, especially out of season without a license. You might talk to animal control and see what your options are. I took them to an oil refinery out in the country about ten miles away and released them, far enough away that they wouldn't find their way back. Or if I were going fishing in the marsh I'd dump them there. Not legal and not very courteous to people that lived around there but hopefully the gators were well fed. I wasn't ready to handle that many squirrel bodies.

It sounds like you are targeting a certain squirrel so I'll tell these stories. In my 50' x 75' garden in Arkansas one spring, a rabbit was eating my bean sprouts as fast as they were coming up. I killed 16 rabbits out of that garden before I got the last one doing that. That was rabbits I saw in the garden, not just ones in the area. I don't know how many of those rabbits were actually eating the sprouts, probably not all of them.

Also in Arkansas a skunk came through a pet door to get in the garage and sprayed when the dogs noticed it. I was not pleased. It was breeding season so the males were on the move. I killed seven skunks in the next couple of weeks. I don't know if I got the guilty one or not. If you have one squirrel, skunk, or anything else you have more.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Squirrels have hung pairs of walnuts from the top of my garden fence at least twice that I can remember. Presumably the message is 'you do know we can climb this. right?'. Yesterday I opened the front door to find a squirrel shelling a walnut on my front steps. I have yet to chase out the squirrel which has taken up residence in my small shed; when I closed off all entrances, it chewed a hole in the soffit... and on the house, they've chewed open much of the gutter topper. I often wish that I was not strongly allergic to cats, because I would love to adopt 5-6.

Back when I was in college, I was outside my apartment one day with a bag of unshelled macadamia nuts (this was back when I wasn't allergic to them) and a hammer. One of the nuts got hit by the hammer the wrong way and went flying.

About a week later, I am walking down the hill to begin my weekly trip to the grocery store, and I see a squirrel with something round in it's mouth, as I get closer, I realize it is the macadamia nut that I had lost. The squirrel ran away after that, but I sometimes wonder if it ever managed to actually gnaw it's way into it (macadamia nut shells are REALLY hard)

And then there was the time with the stone nutmegs (nutmegs that still have their outer shell on them) and a squirrel stole one. I actually got worried about that since, if a single whole nutmeg is enough to send a human into a hallucinogenic condition, I can only imagine what it will do to a squirrel.

 

[flowerbug]

...
And then there was the time with the stone nutmegs (nutmegs that still have their outer shell on them) and a squirrel stole one. I actually got worried about that since, if a single whole nutmeg is enough to send a human into a hallucinogenic condition, I can only imagine what it will do to a squirrel.

i'm guessing that they might not be as succeptible to the compounds at least the way they seem to tolerate gnawing on so many black walnut husks/shells.