Squirrel Damage in a Vegetable Garden.

It didn’t take long before I changed my mind about one of my favorite critters because of the squirrel damage in my vegetable garden – all caused in a couple of days. To make matters worse they started digging up and eating all my tulips last year!

I am an animal lover.  I don’t like to see any creature being hurt in any way.

I remember sitting at my computer desk last year and watching a squirrel run along my fence line with a whole corn cob that he had retrieved from my compost pile, and thinking “how cute!”

Watching them devour all of my almost ready to ripen tomatoes was not so much fun!

Squirrel Damage in a Vegetable Garden can really make a mess.

We recently had visitors from the UK and they actually watched as the squirrels discovered and destroyed my corn.  They were sitting on my deck and watching it sway, got up and discovered it was squirrels having an “all you can eat buffet.”

This was my corn pre-squirrel – only a part of it….the bit that was almost ready to eat.  I had three more areas with gradually growing corn not ready.

Corn before the squirrels, almost ready to harvest.  And this is how it looked after the squirrels got a crack at it.

There was not a single ear left!

More squirrel damage:  they went down the whole row and took off every single cob. But they didn’t stop there!

This patch was just planted and had only started to grow and they demolished it too.  They were looking for any possible corn they could find.

Discouraged, but not unduly so, I just figured I would have no corn.  I did not get much anyway last year.   Little did I know what was waiting for me.

The Squirrel Damage didn’t stop at my corn.

The next day I went out in the morning with my basket to get my harvest and almost passed out when I found dozen and dozens of fully grown tomatoes on the ground, each with a small bite out of them.

All over the garden.  I looked at the 18 tomato plants and they were all in horrible condition.  Squirrels had climbed up them to get to the best of the tomatoes and most were broken off at the top or in some other way damaged. 

This was the state of my tomato plants yesterday:

These were my tomato plants before the squirrels decided to start investigating them for food.

They had dozens of large green tomatoes just starting to ripen. But that was before the nightmare cased by the squirrels.

This was part of my harvest the day of my disaster:

This is only a tiny part of of the damaged cased by the squirrels. I brought in dozens and dozens of tomatoes damaged in some way. They were obviously looking for moisture.

The tomatoes had a bite out of them and then were just discarded.

In order not to lose my mind, and all my tomatoes, I went out and brought in EVERY tomato left on the vines. Big ones, small ones, anything I thought they might eat.

I put them all in platters to ripen indoors and hoped for the best. 

This is the state of my tomato plants now.  Most look similar to this.  None are producing any longer, all have broken tops to the stems:

This was the state of my tomato plants after the squirrel fiasco.  I was heartbroken for days.

Have I mentioned that when I see a squirrel now, my first thought is not “oh how cute?”

Check out this article to see my natural squirrel repellent ideas.

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