SQUIRRELS: How to discourage these 4-legged stomachs?

July 9, 2019 6:20 AM

Our garden -- figs and tomatoes, primarily -- is being hit daily by small furry marauders. We've dribbled pee around the fig trees and hug shiny Xmas ornaments from the branches, but the little so-and-so's don't seem daunted. What to do?

Mrs. Monkeysuit and I have done a fair bit of research into this problem. Aside from positioning plush animals here and there to frighten them off, moving our bird feeders, and hanging old CDs that spin in the wind, we're looking into placing human and cat hair around the garden plants. Does anyone out there have experience getting rid of the thieves? We are beginning to fear that we won't get any harvest at all this year -- or very little. Help!

posted by Guy_Inamonkeysuit to Home & Garden (24 answers total)

What about some sort of garden cage for the tomatoes?
posted by k8t at 6:31 AM on July 9, 2019

We had to fully cage our strawberries with relatively fine wire mesh. I agree, squirrels are the worst. Mostly I just grow cherry tomatoes and accept some loss.
posted by puffyn at 6:32 AM on July 9, 2019

Response by poster: We do have wire cages for our tomatoes, k8t, but more to give them something to grow upon. The mesh is big enough that the squirrels can squeeze through, unfortunately. We didn't foresee the problems we'd be having.
posted by Guy_Inamonkeysuit at 6:58 AM on July 9, 2019

Yes, I don't mean tomato cages for structure but an actual cage to put over the plants.
posted by k8t at 7:13 AM on July 9, 2019 [2 favorites]

Check this out - it's a mesh compost bin repurposed as a tomato plant protector. You could rig up something like this.
posted by showbiz_liz at 7:52 AM on July 9, 2019 [2 favorites]

(I got nothing on the figs though. We had a fig tree in my yard growing up and we'd get about a bowl a year before the birds got the rest of them!)
posted by showbiz_liz at 7:52 AM on July 9, 2019

Is there a source of fresh water for them elsewhere in the yard? That's always been the family tradition. Won't keep them out of fruit trees but they do tend to leave the tomatoes specifically alone.
posted by Lyn Never at 7:57 AM on July 9, 2019 [2 favorites]

Dusting everything with cayenne pepper is supposed to keep them away. I'd give that a shot too.
posted by jquinby at 7:59 AM on July 9, 2019

Some years, the neighborhood squirrels are just bigger assholes than others. I have an enclosed concrete backyard (South Philly rowhouse) and grow a LOT of vegetables, herbs, and fruit in containers. Sure, they'll jump into my garden and steal the occasional tomato. I've nearly given up eating any apples from my poor underproducing dwarf apple tree, as the squirrels LOVE knocking down the fruit while underripe (eating only one bite, naturally.) But generally, if we shoo them away often enough (we spray 'em with a blast from the garden hose and holler at them), they will mostly find someone else to annoy.

And then, the year before last, we had a squirrel(s) that were smarter? more stubborn? possessed? They were defiant when we tried to shoo them away. They would come back literally as soon as we turned our backs. They ignored hair, cayenne, various other repellents, and shiny reflective tape streamers.

They systematically stripped every single fruit from every tomato plant. I've never seen squirrels have this much aggressive...focus. We enclosed the plants in netting, they ripped it off. We enclosed the plants in small-mesh chicken wire, they ripped it and got inside. We finally built a frame box covered in chicken wire with a latch to protect the last tomatoes, but by then, that plant was pretty stressed and it petered out.

It was infuriating and disheartening. That garden produces a significant amount of the food we eat in the summer and fall. I have never in my life been even a tiny bit interested in shooting an animal for any reason, but I wanted to shoot the squirrels that year. (Reader, I did not. With the way our yard is situated, there is absolutely positively no safe way to use any sort of gun, even a BB gun, without risking harm to people or property.)

But the good news is that in subsequent years, the squirrels have behaved more normally.
posted by desuetude at 8:17 AM on July 9, 2019 [1 favorite]

Our solution for the squirrels eating walnuts was twofold. One, offer u-pick walnut-fed squirrel to everyone we know. Not very effective. Two, pick the walnuts green and pickle them. Much more effective.

Intercept the fruits from the squirrels before they want it. Look into the abundance of online unripe fig & tomato recipes.
posted by aniola at 8:29 AM on July 9, 2019

My sympathies. Nothing has ever worked for me. They ate through the plastic container that I kept the cayenne pepper in. Used the various hair (dog, cat and people) for their nests. Ignored dog urine. Dug up around and under fencing and chicken wire. They've destroyed everything they could possibly destroy in my yard. I have not escalated it but I've yet to find a workable solution that is both legal and not cruel.
posted by Ashwagandha at 8:43 AM on July 9, 2019

desuetude, there was a mast year for oak trees/ acorns in my area in 2017, and a wild proliferation of squirrels in 2018. They got my entire garden. Mast years occur over a very large region, so oak trees in your area are likely the cause. I'm in Maine.

I have a cherry tree that is finally producing enough cherries for pie. Last year, the birds got every cherry the moment they were close to ripe. This year I used deer netting and a hula hoop to shroud the cherry tree. We'll see.
posted by theora55 at 8:56 AM on July 9, 2019

Serious question: are you willing to kill the squirrels?
posted by saladin at 9:14 AM on July 9, 2019

Response by poster: saladin, I'd rather not. I doubt trapping them would work; I suspect others would take their places.
posted by Guy_Inamonkeysuit at 10:21 AM on July 9, 2019

For physical barrier protection, it's tempting to try to protect the whole tree or the whole plant, and you end up with awkward frames and throwing huge tangly netting trying to cover the top of hte tree but then they sneak through the gaps... so much hassle! It's a lot more practical to triage, decide you're going to lose some fruit, and put a lot of effort into saving a few convenient branches-worth. Take plastic mesh bag (like onion bags or similar, stretchy with few-mm size holes) to cover the end of a handy branch, tie it off snug to the branch behind a couple of fruit clusters.
posted by aimedwander at 10:45 AM on July 9, 2019 [1 favorite]

Using podcasts worked for Rob Dubbin to keep bears away. You might see if the squirrels are similar dissuaded by the sound of human voices?
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 10:47 AM on July 9, 2019

Oh, yeah, if you want to go the triage route, these bug-rearing meshes from BugDorm are really easy to use, and do as good a job keeping bugs and stuff out as they do keeping bugs in.
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 10:49 AM on July 9, 2019

Father-in-Law used to wrap his figs in aluminum foil (all of them, yep, right on the tree as they grew and ripened; so festive!) to keep the birds off them. Maybe that'll work for squirrels, too?
posted by notyou at 12:39 PM on July 9, 2019

The only time in 25 years I did not battle squirrels in my backyard is when we had our sweet doggie, she loved chasing them. She caught a few here and there. Mostly scaring the heck out of them. . Without her, it is a losing battle. But since my kids are grown and I am close to moving, I just keep the yard neat and not worry about squirrels now.
posted by ReiFlinx at 2:48 PM on July 9, 2019

Do you have any sages you can try sprinkling around a test case? Just grab leaves, crumble them in your hand, throw them around. Russian, culinary, salvias-whatever. I think they hate it. They other thing I think they all hate is eggs so try whirring one in a blender with four cups of water?

(Keeping animals from eating my garden is 25% of my gardening activity. It exceeds 'weeding'.)

Also have lots of thoughts on voles. (Daffodil bulbs.)
posted by A Terrible Llama at 2:50 PM on July 9, 2019

We had squirrels living in the eaves, and eventually attic of our house. We relocated about a dozen of them in traps over about 3 weeks and then made repairs after a week without a squirrel. They did not return. It definitely is labor intensive and required driving several miles to a wooded area. We took all the squirrels to the same location so they would reconnect and hopefully not try to return. It did work.
posted by citygirl at 4:56 PM on July 9, 2019

I am engaged in eternal garden war with squirrels (and their chipmunk brethren). Cayenne pepper is bullshit. They will chew through any weaknesses in protective netting. The only thing that works is picking your tomatoes the instant they start changing color, then letting them ripen safely indoors on a windowsill or kitchen window. Trust me, any other tomato protecting attempts will end in either heartbreak or insanity (or both). I have never enjoyed a truly vine-ripened slicing tomato, but kitchen-ripened ones are very delicious.

(Cherry tomatoes get to ripen on the vine - the squirrels don’t seem to climb too high for those.)
posted by Maarika at 8:07 PM on July 9, 2019

P.S. one year I grew tomatoes on our apartment roof, and a squirrel stole my only slicing tomato, carried it down three stories, and left it on the knot of a tree directly outside my apartment window. I assume it was the same squirrel that chewed through our kitchen window screen, broke into our apartment, landed on some knives drying on the counter, knocked them to the floor, and then got the fuck back out through the window screen. Squirrels are the worst.
posted by Maarika at 8:15 PM on July 9, 2019

Follow up to my "killing the squirrels" question: you mention cat hair... does that mean you have a cat, or several cats? Are they allowed outside? Do they hunt?

I ask because I've only ever seen one effective squirrel deterrent in my life. Her name was Roxanne. She was a bright orange feral kitten that my family adopted when I was about six, and in addition to being adorable and sweet she was also the fiercest squirrel hunter this world has ever seen. We lived in a house that backed up to lush woods and a creek, and our yard and our neighbors' yards were full of fruit trees, and during Roxanne's glory days nary a squirrel set foot in our property line, because doing so was a death sentence. We got so tired of finding squirrel heads on our back porch that we put a bell on her, and it didn't slow her down even a little bit. Our next door neighbor was an old Syrian lady who grew quinces, and she adored Roxanne even more than we did. She would sit on her back porch and cheer her on as the cat would shimmy 60 feet up a longleaf pine tree to corner a wayward squirrel. It was nuts.

I know there's a lot of compelling reasons not to allow cats outside at all, especially if there's any chance of them hunting local wildlife, but a female barn cat with a wild streak is basically unbeatable when it comes to keeping the local rodent population down. Something to consider?
posted by saladin at 6:53 AM on July 14, 2019 [1 favorite]