The Groundhogs Strike Back

It appears that we have new tenants this year. Another family of groundhogs — one adult and four little furballs — has moved into the space under our shed. At first we were unconcerned, even pleased, about this, because we were trusting our modified groundhog fence to foil all attempts at burrowing under, climbing over, or squeezing through the gaps into the garden. And since none of our previous groundhog tenants had ever messed with the crops outside the fenced area, such as the rhubarb and asparagus, we figured we had nothing to fear from them.

However, we'd forgotten about the newly installed flowerbed in the front yard. Shortly after we first met our new neighbors, Brian spotted one of them in the front yard and realized that all the plants we'd gone to such trouble to acquire were at risk of getting munched. He'd heard before that the smell of cat urine tended to scare groundhogs off, since cats are predators, so he took to scooping the clumps out of the cat box, breaking them up, and scattering them around the border of the flowerbed. This, as far as we could tell, was entirely ineffective. After he'd been at it for about three days, we discovered that roughly half the plants in the bed had been chomped on to some degree or other. The victims included two the yarrow plants (which groundhogs aren't even supposed to like), one sedum, one coreopsis, and basically all the echinaceas and violas. The only ones to remain untouched were the hellebores, which are poisonous and also, apparently, taste disgusting.

Clearly, we'd have to find some other way to protect our plants if we didn't want our latest attempt at creating a three-season flower garden to flop like the others. In particular, we wanted to save the sedum plants if at all possible. The hellebores seemed all right, and all the others could be regrown from seed, but the sedums had to be special ordered from a nursery, and we didn't want to go to the trouble or expense a second time. Plus, they were some of the largest plants in the bed, and we were counting on them to grow quickly and fill in some of the empty space.

I hit on the idea of deploying the Hudson SQ-X Squirrel Excluder — a cage of chicken wire and wood scraps that Brian had originally built to protect our eggplants from squirrel damage. We only had one of these left of the two Brian built, as he'd dismantled the other one earlier this year to turn the chicken wire into smaller cages for our young pepper plants. But since they were no longer needed for that purpose, we were able to put both the smaller cages and the remaining large one to use guarding the sedums and a few of the other plants.

However, since this still left quite a few plants unprotected, we looked into other ways to deter these furry critters without harming them. We'd previously seen an article recommending things that move in the breeze, such as wind chimes, spinners, or pinwheels, for chasing away squirrels, so when my mom offered us some decorative pinwheels she wasn't using, we decided it couldn't hurt to give them a try. Unfortunately, these particular pinwheels turned out to be pretty much useless at creating motion. Instead of large "sails" to catch the breeze, they had only tiny, confetti-like specks of red, white, and blue that barely moved in even the strongest winds. We left them up as decorations for the Fourth of July weekend, but we knew we couldn't count on them to scare off mammals of any kind.

So I did a little further research and came across this article in the Farmers' Almanac, which recommended several natural remedies. While some of them (such as cat litter and human hair) had already proved useless, there were a couple of others that looked promising — especially cayenne pepper spray, which deters groundhogs both with its scent and with its heat. I could easily imagine that if I were a groundhog and I took a healthy bite out of a plant doused in pepper juice, I'd quickly lose all inclination to come back for more.

The Farmers' Almanac simply said to use "a mixture of 2 teaspoons cayenne with one quart of water," but another site I consulted had a more elaborate recipe: 4 to 5 tablespoons of red pepper flakes (or 10 fresh hot peppers, finely chopped), simmered for 15 minutes in a gallon of water, then left to sit for 24 hours, strained, and mixed with a teaspoon of olive oil to help it adhere to the leaves. Brian prepared a quarter-size batch using one quart of water and one tablespoon of pepper flakes, and the simmering liquid gave off an eye-watering miasma that seemed like a strong indication it would be effective. He let it cool, strained it, and mixed in the oil as instructed, leaving a rust-colored mixture that had clearly retained quite a bit of the fiery red oils from the pepper flakes. Then he transferred this to a spray bottle and gave all the plants, particularly the uncaged ones, a good spritzing.

So far, this seems to be working. He first applied the mixture last weekend and has reapplied it after every rainfall, and the flowers have suffered no further groundhog damage in that time. So I guess we'll keep it up until either (a) it stops deterring the groundhogs, or (b) they grow up and move out of our yard, or (c) the plants get big enough to handle the odd bite here and there without suffering any serious damage.

There is a postscript to this story: Last week, Brian saw that one of the little groundhogs had actually managed to get into the garden — that is, inside the fence — and was cheerfully munching on our lettuces. When it spotted him, it freaked out and escaped by climbing over up of our new potato plants and out over the top of the fence. However, this clearly wasn't the route it had used to get in, since the plants are on the inside of the fence and there's no way to climb up them from outside. He conducted a thorough survey of the border fence and found one place where the chicken wire had worked itself loose, leaving a gap that a baby groundhog could conceivably squeeze through. He fixed that, and since then we haven't seen any more groundhogs inside the garden, so we're hoping we've now blocked all their modes of ingress. But we're keeping a sharp eye out, just in case.