Hmmm ... well, this is bizarre to me anyway. I came home from work yesterday to find that all of my Dill is GONE. There's a few stalks laying on the ground, but that's it. I had a few plants and to show for it were maybe 5 stalks on the ground.
This morning, I'm looking out my window to find Mr. Tree Rat jumping up and pulling down stalks of my milkweed, and acting like the plant is a jungle gym.
Has anyone had this problem before? Short of deporting the Tree Rat, any suggestions?
Felicia - I have 5 squirrels that frequent my garden. I do feed them around the bird feeding post. They use my Passion Flower vines as a rope to climb up my fence. And yes! they do some damage to some of my plants. I sprinkle regular table pepper around my garden beds. They don't like it because it gets up their nose and makes them sneeze. Try shaking some pepper around your plants. That might help discourage them from destroying your garden plants! Good luck!
Thanks Becky!!
Think pepper may work on bunnies too? Think I've found culprit number 2....
I do love the wildlife here (deer, coyotes, wild turkey, etc.,), but they are all going to have to understand that I'm trying to help with the butterfly population too, and stay away from my host plants! :)
Not sure, but you could try the pepper with the rabbits, too. I'll tell ya a cute story.....
At my school, we have a large butterfly garden using a 3-tier garden bed. A mother rabbit recently created a nest on the second tier in a shallow burrow. We have been watching 4 cute little babies develop and mature over the past week. They are sooooo cute!! We haven't shown any of the students except 2 who we can trust not to tell others. We know other students would try to take them and they are still nursing from mom. We never see mother bunny at all. But she apparently felt they were safe there. We had a rabbit do the same thing last year in another garden bed at our school. That area is gated and locked at night. Folks can't get into that area of the school, so mother rabbit is safe raising her babies there. We haven't noticed her eating any of our dill or parsley yet. But we don't care if she does. We have quite a lot of butterflies in that area of the garden. So we aren't worried about the lack of butterflies if some of the host plants get eaten. I think the reason that everything likes it there is because it is a sheltered area from the weather elements. And the students at the school will actually stop in their tracks to let a butterfly float by. We are going to put up "Butterfly Crossing" signs! LOL!
This message was edited Jun 2, 2007 8:11 AM
That's so sweet, Becky. :) Baby bunnies are just so cute. It's great to see children get into nature, instead of spending all their time indoors watching TV or playing video games.
What grade do you teach? By the sounds of it, you teach in elementary school.
Well, I bought more dill to replace the plants that were destroyed, but before I could even plant the new dill, they were destroyed! Guess I can't grow dill in my backyard. LOL!!
