About a three hundred and sixty five days inside the past, Brian and I observed that our eggplant crop come to be being poached with the resource of squirrels. The stupid rodents were not even eating them; they had been yanking the tiny culmination off the plant after which, seemingly, knowing that they have been not nuts and discarding them. So we realized that if we was hoping to harvest any eggplant this yr, we would need some way to keep the little varmints' mitts off them. We tried pepper spray closing 12 months, however it changed into form of a trouble to address; as it washes off every time it rains, which takes place pretty often in the summer time, we needed to hold reapplying it severa times each week (and it grew to turn out to be out to be too beyond due to shop any of our eggplants, anyway). So this one year, we figured we might see what we are able to do approximately developing some sort of physical barrier.
Introducing the Hudson SQ-X Squirrel Excluder. Basically, it's only a cage constructed of chook cord, massive enough to fit over eggplants planted component by way of using element. It's now not foolproof, due to the fact the holes in the mesh are despite the fact that small enough for squirrels to suit their paws thru, so any eggplant that paperwork proper subsequent to the brink of the cage may be within their keep close. But my wish that they may be both to dumb to discern out that they are capable of attain thru the twine, or clever enough to parent out that even supposing they did, they might not be capable of get the eggplants out. The flora are simply beginning to form culmination, so we are able to see the way it does. If we are able to manage to defend the eggplants until they reach the scale of an actual egg, I think we're going to be ok; genuinely the squirrels need to be capable of understand them as not-a-nut via then.
And talking of makeshift gadgets for the garden, check out Brian's other new device: the Hudson SQ-SL Squash Sling. Our butternut squash plants already have good half-dozen healthy-sized squash on them (much better than what we got last year), and they were getting big enough to weigh down the vines and pose a risk of pulling them loose from the trellises. Mel Bartholomew, of Square Foot Gardening fame, actually says this hasn't been a problem for him—the stems just get bigger and thicker as the squash do, so they have no trouble holding up their weight. But Brian doesn't like to take chances, so he fashioned some sling supports out of something we already had a plentiful supply of: the mesh bags that onions come in. We'd been saving these up in a cardboard box, figuring that all this tough but loose netting was bound to be the ideal material for something, sometime, and now it's finally being put to use. So even if the slings aren't strictly necessary, they've at least served to justify our months if not years of bag hoarding.
Now all we need is some form of device to maintain the birds from ingesting all our new bush cherries, and we ought to be in properly form.
