[pbs] Rats vs rats
Rodger Whitlock
totototo at pacificcoast.net
Fri Sep 3 17:27:05 EDT 2004
On 2 Sep 04 at 22:27, Lee Poulsen wrote:
> The squirrels on the other hand were a horrible problem. There were
> pecan and oak trees in the neighbors' yards so they had plenty to
> eat. They never ate any of my plants or bulbs. What they would do,
> however, was pull the plants or growing bulbs out of the pots and
> put an acorn or pecan in the resulting hole and leave the plant to
> wither and die in the daytime sun. Apparently they were lazy
> squirrels and didn't want to go to the trouble of digging holes in
> the real ground! Each spring I still had to pull seedling oaks or
> pecans out of various random pots.
I have the same problem with the squirrels here, but the nut mix is
acorns-and-filberts. The squirrels are very deft about inserting nuts
into pots: it's often impossible to detect any soil disturbance until
a seedling emerges.
Some of the filbert seedlings are from a proper nut bush next door,
others are from the native Corylus douglasii on my own property, but
I can't tell their seedlings apart; if I could, I'd pot up the native
ones for distribution.
For those of you with collections of potted bulbs kept in frames of
some sort, a screen or mesh cover will go a long way toward
preventing this kind of difficulty. Screen will also keep out flying
pests such as bulb fly.
--
Rodger Whitlock
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Maritime Zone 8, a cool Mediterranean climate
on beautiful Vancouver Island
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