Squirrel Defense

 

We have some SERIOUS squirrel issues. Yes, that's right. Squirrels. The crazy things ate EVERY SINGLE one of our garden tomatoes this summer. All of them! Believe it or not, we didn't plant our garden just to watch these fury friends gobble them up. Apparently they didn't get the memo. Unfortunately, the squirrels don't just have an appetite for tasty tomatoes. They REALLY come into full force when Halloween approaches.

These things must be some sort of hybrid breed because I've never witnessed anything quite like it. I lived across from a woods my entire childhood and we never had anything attack our pumpkins. Ever! Now that we live in the city? This is what happens...

Pumpkins, really? Didn't they get enough tomatoes this summer?!?! Well I finally decided enough was enough. It's time to strike back!

I did some research on remedies and received all kinds of recommendations. Everything from applying Vaseline to spraying wolf urine. Interesting ideas but surely we could come up with something a bit more ummmmm, front door friendly? As it turns out, squirrels apparently don't like anything spicy. They didn't eat any of my peppers this summer, so it must be true? A few people also had success with hairspray, so I decided to come up with a little combination of both.

I purchased some inexpensive hairspray at Target, grabbed Sriracha out of the cabinet, and decided to see what kind of combination I could come up with.

I started out by completely coating each pumpkin with hairspray. LOTS OF HAIRSPRAY. I did the top first, let it dry for 10-15 minutes, flipped each pumpkin over, and then coated the bottom side, too.

Once the bottom side was dry, I flipped all of the pumpkins back over and gave everything another good coat. If nothing else, at least the pumpkins smell pretty good. :) At this point, I had applied two heavy coats of hairspray to each pumpkin and used approximately half of the bottle. Now it was time to add the spice! I didn't really want to squirt Sriracha all over the pumpkins, so I decided to add a decent amount to my remaining half bottle of hairspray - I would guess about 1 teaspoon or so. I then shook bottle really well and attempted to spray the mixture all over the pumpkins.

Well, I got about 3 sprays in before everything clogged up. The Sriracha simply made the liquid too think for the pump. I ended up opening the hairspray bottle and pouring the solution over the top of each pumpkin.

As you can see in the photos below, there are a few visible Sriracha "flakes"  on the pumpkins, but overall it's not very noticeable.

Let's just hope it works! In the past, our pumpkins haven't lasted more than about 48 hours, so I'll report back soon with our success/failure rate. Let's hope our neighborhood squirrels don't acquire an appetite for spicy food!!