Be a Critter Detective!
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A few years ago, I installed solar lights around my vegetable garden. The lights are the type that are on a stake you just stick into the ground. I installed them because I liked the way they look. To my surprise, the lights turned out to be a deer deterrent. I haven’t had a single deer in my garden since I installed the solar lights. We live in a rural area with LOTS of deer. I think the light keeps rabbits out of the garden who visit after dark. (My dog is on rabbit patrol during the day. Lol)
My problem is with rats. They'll eat all the green stuff on my veg overnight.
I have been using Bobbex R for years to great effect. This year, all the rabbits and chipmunks seem to have become acclimated to it. They're still in the garden. Should I just keep spraying and hope they finally are disgusted with how everything smells to them?
Okay.. for the deer, my Aunt who is 90 and has been farming since she was a child uses Irish Spring bar soap. She crochets these little nets and hangs them all around her strawberry plants and they leave them alone.. you could probably use any kind of little netting as long as the scent can be smelled by the deer. Now I have a question.. how do you protect against Groundhogs? Most of the farmers around here just shoot them.. which I do not want to do.
This page has tips on how to control groundhogs: http://www.almanac.com/pest/woodchucks-or-groundhogs
Hope this helps!
To my surprise I found a TURTLE eating my tomatoes, he even came back another day and I SHOT him with my Canon Camera.
Some kind of critter is biting off the stems of my flowers at the base. Not eating anything, just letting everything lay there. The bites are at an angle. What is it??? It's destroying all my expensive flowers! Petunias and superbells. I've had marigolds in the same pot, and they still destroy the other flowers.
I had this same problem last year with damage to several types of flowers, single stem sunflowers got the worst with 18 out of 30 down in just 2 days. Super frustrated, I knelt down behind my sweet pea trellis and slowly harvested sweet pea flowers as I watched out for the animals responsible. After about an hour they came swooping down chopping young sunflowers in half and just left the tops next to where they were happily growing. DAMN BIRDS! So ruthless and arrogant. Like my sunflowers weren't good enough they had to spit them right out and chop as many more down out of spite. I ended up hanging a string of thin metal stove burner covers around the area I'm a way they could move about in the wind. It totally worked. Now if I can get these savage rabbits out of my flowers without putting fencing everywhere, life will be easier.
Maybe it’s cutworms. I usually worry about cutworms when planting tomatoes. Who knows, maybe the horrid creatures have developed a taste for petunias and supercells.
Perhaps it is a rabbit? They sometimes chew off stems at an angle. You might try scattering a thick band of flour on the soil surface around your plants on a dry day/evening; the next day, see if any pawprints show up. The tracks might help you to ID the animals (which might also include a squirrel, groundhog, etc.). It probably isn't a cutworm, since these usually attack earlier in the season.