Rats vs rats

Rodger Whitlock totototo@pacificcoast.net
Mon, 06 Sep 2004 05:27:05 PDT
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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