Hello everyone, welcome to my blog. Today I’d like to talk about the battles that I’m having with squirrels. For the past few years of my gardening I have always tried to grow pumpkins. I have a thing for pumpkins lol -apparently it goes way back to when I was a little girl growing vegetables in the backyard with my grandma. So every year since maybe 2015, when I started gardening in a little plot off of the kitchen patio when we lived on base housing, I have always tried to grow pumpkins. I didn’t really get the chance to really get into gardening and planting until recently.
I had one raised bed back at our house in NC and there was so much growing in just that one bed. From strawberries, tomatoes, Carrots, Honeydews. Now I have four raised beds and I’m growing more than I have been before.
Now to the fight against the squirrels. When we first moved into this new place there would be a couple of squirrels here and there, but we didn’t have anything growing for them to eat, so maybe they were jus checking out the new people. Now two years later and we have so much growing. Last year I guess I wasn’t growing anything that they liked to eat, so we didn’t see them. This growing season I have lost about two pumpkins and a couple of squash due to the squirrels coming to have a morning snack. So I have resorted to searching the Google and asking for information from a couple of homesteaders. One thing I found was that squirrels dislike Mint so I moved the mint that I had in the planter and put it near the pumpkin and squash patch. Then I went and bought two more plants to put around them, so we will see how those work on keeping them away.
I have also purchased Bone Meal fertilizer to see how that works, plus it’s a bonus I get to fertilize my plants and give them the food and nutrients that they need. I am still searching for ways to keep them at bay and away from all of my plants. I’ve also seen that they dislike the taste of peppers and anything hot, but the only problem with that is that you will constantly have to put it around the plants, because it will just get washed away from the rain(barely any here in sunny California) and from the plants being watered. So there’s that idea. I also put up the chicken wire around the patch. Hopefully these methods workout and they get the point, but we shall see about that.
The biggest pumpkin we had so far and the squirrels got to it.
Well I hope that you enjoyed my rant about dealing with the garden pests. Hopefully all of my attempts to keep the squirrels away. If not I will continue to find away to grow my pumpkins and other veggies.
Come back soon, much love!!! The Petersen Homestead.
The Petersen homestead 