Small Home Gazette, Spring 2023
Squirrel Deterral
A Solution to Planter Chaos
Are squirrels adorable little residents of our bungalow neighborhoods, entertaining us with acrobatic antics while serving as a reminder to invest our metaphorical nuts for the future? Or are they evil vermin—urban interlopers who delight in destroying our carefully curated yards and gardens, and occasionally gnawing their way into our attics?
Over the past two centuries, Americans’ answer to both questions has been “yes,” though our perspective periodically shifts. But more on that in a bit.
Perennial Pests
Each summer since I bought my bungalow, squirrels have wrecked my outdoor container planters. They dig deep, uprooting flowers and tossing them and a lot of soil this way and that. It takes just one squirrel-rooting frenzy to trash all the flower pots and the length of my window box.
Arrows indicate gaps where squirrels uprooted flowers in my window box.
I have tried several solutions. I applied granular and liquid commercial squirrel deterrents. I purchased plastic stakes filled with garlic oil, which they hate, supposedly. These methods worked to some degree, at least for a while. But all needed to be reapplied regularly, as their effectiveness waned with time.
My most successful trick was to sprinkle powdered cayenne pepper in and around the planters. Apparently, squirrels’ noses are just as vulnerable to hot pepper as is mine. But if it rained or I watered the planters, the pepper would wash away, and I would have to wait for everything to thoroughly dry before reapplying it. Oftentimes, I would forget.
But usually, as summer wore on, I would let my guard down, and/or the squirrels would just overcome their aversion to deterrents and start digging anyway.
Inspiration Strikes
A section of chicken wire, cut almost in half, ready to fit around plant stems in a window box planter.
Finally, last summer I hit on the idea of using chicken wire. I reasoned that if it protects chickens from predators, maybe it would protect flowers from marauding rodents. I bought a two-foot-wide roll of chicken wire at Home Depot and clipped off sections that were a few inches larger than the top opening of my planter boxes and flower pots. I used snips to cut through the center of each piece—almost separating it into two pieces, but not quite. I then spread the two segments and brought them back together around the base of the flowers’ stems, under the foliage, just above the soil.
Twist the two sections of the wire together around the bases of the plants. If they cannot be brought close enough together, use separate pieces of flexible wire to close the gaps.
If there are several plants in one pot, you may need to snip additional wires to work the chicken wire around the stalks. If you are able to get the sections of wire to meet, twist them together. If the gaps are too wide, use separate pieces of flexible wire (bread bag twist-ties, for example) to bridge them. The goal is to leave as few openings in the web of wire as possible.
top: Chicken wire fitted on window box planters. The two sections of each piece have been brought together in the center, around the stems of the flowers, while the outside edges were bent over the rims of the planters.
bottom: Even after applying chicken wire, a squirrel found a gap between two sections, pushed them apart, and dug up the flowers. I twisted the wire ends together to seal the gap, and the squirrels left it alone.
For window box planters, I bent the wire down over the edges of the planters and wedged them back in the window box. For flower pots, I used the same technique, but rather than folding the chicken wire over the outside of each pot’s rim, I bent it down and tucked it between the pot’s interior walls and the soil.
Much to my surprise, this technique worked—mostly. After chicken-wiring everything, a squirrel was successful in digging once more through the gap I had cut in the chicken wire. I wired the gap closed and the squirrel gave up.
For flower pots, the edges of the chicken wire can be tucked between the soil and the inner wall of the pot.
This spring, I am hoping that if I install the chicken wire first thing instead of halfway through the summer, the squirrels may not attempt to dig at all. And I may forgo cutting the chicken wire up the center to spread it around the plant’s stems—maybe the seedlings will be small enough to poke through the chicken wire’s openings.
But It Is Not Over…
I still have one more squirrel-proofing challenge.
Awhile back, I read a post on Nextdoor.com in which a neighbor lamented that someone had come along and clipped each blossom off her just-bloomed front yard tulips. The perpetrator did not take the blossoms but left them lying next to the plants, as if to drive home the senselessness of the act. How could anyone be so randomly heartless? Was there no limit to peoples’ cruelty?
It is debatable as to whether there is a limit to human cruelty, but I am pretty sure there is no boundary to a squirrel’s mischief. I responded to my neighbor that human passersby were not to blame for the carnage—I once happened to glance out my back window to see a squirrel rear up on its hind legs, sniff one of my tulips, then tilt its head and gingerly nip the bloom off where it met the stem. It sniffed the decapitated blossom, then moved to the next tulip and bit its bloom off as well. I flung open the back door and yelled it away, but it returned later to do more damage. Each spring I lose about half of my tulip blossoms.
Do any of you have this issue? Have you come up with a solution? Or do you just accept headless tulips as a fact of life?
Squirrels During the Bungalow Era
For a quick overview of Americans’ attitude toward urban gray squirrels during the past 200 years, see “A History of New York Squirrels,” published by New York magazine in 2014. The article documents how attitudes have regularly swung between viewing them as adorable almost-pets to a symbol of nature out of balance. Once a fairly rare species found mostly in forests, gray squirrels were introduced by Victorians to New York’s Central Park in the 1870s. They proliferated and were almost universally adored.
But during the 1920s and ‘30s, according to the article, “The nascent ecological movement placed more importance on the realities—rather than the idealization—of nature. Birds of prey and other natural squirrel predators were now regarded more highly, and the squirrel continued its fall from favor.”
But by 2010, the New York City Parks Department had a new mascot named Pearl the Squirrel; and in 2013, an official squirrel-nest webcam went live.
And what about Minnesota? For a history of gray squirrels in Minneapolis and St. Paul, I encourage you to read the informative and entertaining January 2023 Star Tribune article titled, “Did a famed parks leader import gray squirrels to Minneapolis—and have the red ones killed?”.
The answer to the article’s headline is “yes.” The parks leader would be none other than Superintendent Theodore Wirth. In 1909, he supplanted native red squirrels with gray squirrels, which he imported from Washington, D.C. He did it because red squirrels raided the nests of songbirds, causing a decline in their population. Wirth asserted that gray squirrels did not disturb bird nests (but he was wrong).
By 1919, in the midst of the Twin Cities’ bungalow building boom, the Parks Department declared the squirrel initiative a success: “The gray squirrels, which were introduced in Loring Park about twelve years ago, have extended their hunting grounds over the entire system and city.”
But, according to the Star Tribune article, “They adapted to city life so eagerly that by 1930, the Tribune was lamenting that Loring Park’s squirrels had become spoiled ‘cream-puff squirrels’ that bore little resemblance to their ancestral ‘true’ gray squirrel of the American wilderness.”
My view of squirrels? I admit they can be pretty cute, and I may or may not have watched a few YouTube videos of squirrels that were rescued as babies, being cuddled by their human benefactors. But come spring and the little beasts start lopping off my tulips’ heads, I may or may not be fantasizing about doing the same to them…
