A nutty situation
How does one best deal with nut-seeking squirrels hellbent on tearing up the garden? Toby has a few ideas…
HOW do you stop a squirrel digging up your lawn? Take away his spade: ba-dum cha! Alan Gardner, the star of C4’s popular series The Autistic Gardener, told me this gag – so you can blame him if tumbleweed is stuck to your chaise longue.
I had asked Alan about stopping squirrel damage as part of an SOS on social media – not for jokes, but to help my friend Ed, whose lawn has got more craters than Mars.
The damage has been done by a single squirrel that climbs down the fence to stash nuts plundered from Ed’s hazel tree. What makes the problem so bad is the double whammy of a beast with an unusually strong hoarding instinct and a bumper harvest of filberts.
But ask Twitter a question, silly or not, and you will get lots of silly answers – and most of my replies were versions of Alan’s joke, including ( just so you know): take away his hand-trowel/ pneumatic drill/JCB.
However, there were a few workable suggestions, including sprinkling extra spicy chilli powder over the grass. I’ve used this technique to protect newly planted spring bulbs, as squirrels quite literally turn up their noses at spicy aromas – but I suspect this fiery solution works best when deterring animals looking for buried treasure, as opposed to those squirrelling it away.
A motion-activated water sprinkler was another excellent idea. This device fixes to a hosepipe, and if Ed had an outside tap it would work a treat. The sprinkler startles (as opposed to harms) anything that crosses in front of its motion sensor’s path, spraying deer, cats and people hanging out washing with a noisy jet of water. That said, there are models that can be programmed to work at night so that only unwanted nocturnal visitors get sprayed.
In the end, Ed pruned out the older fruit-bearing growth from the hazel. In a few years’ time, the filberts will come back and, by then, the burrowing squirrel will have either moved on or gone to the Great Nuttery in the sky. So, it turns out that you do take something to stop a squirrel digging up a lawn: his nuts!