Posts Tagged → squirrels
Garden post script
Every summer my garden grows butternut squash. It is a hardy squash, and a hearty meal. Eaten sweet or savory, hot or cold, baked, fried, boiled, simmered, or mashed, butternut squash is a versatile food that is easy to grow in the home garden. Pesticide free.
Or so I thought it was easy to grow, until this Monday, when I went out to harvest the two or three dozen butternut squash that had grown nicely and were supposed to be waiting to be harvested. As always, every Fall.
Turns out, the much hated local rodent population developed a taste for my butternut squashes, and ate all but two and a half of the several dozen that had been sweetly, placidly dreaming in the fall sunlight the past month. The tree rats AKA “squirrels” which had descended into my personal space en masse for the massive pin oak acorn crop had then unexpectedly turned their attention to the garden.
My garden.
The garden in which I had toiled mightily all spring and summer, and from which I had briefly turned my attention after 90% of its produce had been gathered, had become the hang-out for the socialist rodents in the neighborhood. The freeloaders, the thieves, the gluttons. They ate my butternut squashes.
Pennsylvania is fortunate to have a strong pro-gardening law, which allows gardeners to assertively defend their hard-won crops from marauding pests and vermin, like tree rat squirrels, using all means necessary. In the past, from the time when I was a kid patrolling our family’s large rural garden with a .22 single shot to just a couple years ago, I have always been a “by all means necessary” defender of the garden.
People who think that tree rats are “cute,” or entertaining, are strange. Nothing about destructive gnawing or crop thieving or ruinous scavengers is “cute.” There is no defending this destructive pestilence.
This summer, as in 2025’s growing season, I had tried Repels-All spray, which does work well for a time. You have to stay on top of it, keep it active, because if there is a rain, and it washes away, the tree rats AKA squirrels will find the opening and run amok in your crops. And Repels-All is expensive. And it cannot go on your crops, but just the tree trunks, the fencing, the perimeter. Other means of vermin control are a lot meaner and a lot more effective.
I think it is time to bring a new sheriff into town in 2027…..
The sole survivors of the garden’s once-large butternut squash crop. Notice the squirrel tooth marks