permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

John wrote:
>They have a porcupine problem.
>The prickly critters are eating parts of fruit trees & other choice items.
>How can
>they get rid of them without hurting them or putting up fences?

Hi John; good to see you're here. A few years back the raspberries in my
garden were being devastated by some unknown force; I suspected deer but
couldn't see how they could get over the 8-foot fence. After having most of
the bushes snapped off, I spent the night in my garden with my cat. Squeak
woke me up at about 2 am with her growls, and I trained my flashlight
toward the raspberries at about deer chest height. I watched as one cane
after another went down, but no deer was in sight. Then at ground level, I
saw that a porcupine was pulling down each cane and yanking it thorugh his
teeth to pull off the leaves.

Not having dealt with porkies before, I got a long stick and prodded him
with it to escort him out of the garden. He kicked that stick out of my
hand with an incredibly powerful wallop of his hind legs, and I realized
that was how they set their quills, very deeply, into an attacker. So
(pardon my insensitive approach) I got the garden hose and guided him to
the gate with squirts. The next night I found another, younger porkie in a
pear tree, and soaked him. I felt kind of bad as the drenched little
marauder waddled out. But it's better than killing them by trap or
relocation. One more night of the hose, and I've never seen porkies in the
garden again.

This Pavlovian approach might work for your friends, though I do have a
fence around the garden that, for porcupines, marks off the forbidden zone.

Toby