Gardening Question from Maria:

I have a few questions ~

1. What kind of plants do ground squerals hate and will avoid nesting near on this very steep, very high hill side in Oak View Calif.
2. It is covered with these little darlings and their homes.
3. I don’t want to trap, kill, or hurt them.
4. I just want them to leave peacefully.
5. I’m afraid their ground tunneling will bring the whole hill side down onto the property.

Thank you for any help.

Answer from Pat:

No plant will make a ground squirrel go away. There is nothing they hate that much. If they like your hillside they are there for good unless you do something about it, and unfortunately there is no magic bullet that can get rid of them humanely. Also I don’t think of these unclean creatures as little darlings, no matter how cute the young ones may be. They belong out in nature but not in our gardens. However, I doubt they will make your hillside fall down. How many hillsides have you noticed or read about falling down as a result of ground squirrels? I am not aware of any myself and I have lived in California for over sixty years and I read the newspaper every day and listen to the PBS NewsHour nightly. If any banks were falling down as a result of ground squirrels I would have heard about it by now.

In order that you can understand what I am going to advise on this subject, I have to share with you that after my family emigrated from England to America during the 1930’s, my mother bought and ran a family farm in Bucks County Pennsylvania which is where I spent my teen years during the war. In order to get a tax deduction as a family farm, my resourceful mother discovered we needed to have 10 various kinds of domestic animals. She put us all to work raising 2,000 chickens, plus bantams, Pekin ducks, Muskovie ducks, geese, turkeys, 2 breeds of pigs, sheep, 2 breeds of cows (which I milked) and rabbits, which were in my total charge. All these animals were gentle and friendly and we loved many of them, though not the chickens. Nonetheless, we had to kill some of them in order to put food on our table and money in our pockets. I had to kill many chickens, but I flatly refused to kill the rabbits I had raised with love so my brother had to do it. My brother also shot pheasants in our woods, pigeons off our enormous barn, and from our fields in autumn, wild hares which we marinated for three days and ate as hasenpfeffer. Having experienced this toughening childhood with its many challenges and its great joys, I find I have little sympathy for destructive and disease-carrying pest animals, even though they are all live beings created by the same power that created me. Gophers, rats, and ground squirrels may have their place in the balance of nature, but not in my garden. I usually talk aloud to them before setting forth on a hunt which will end with their demise. It may sound silly but even as a child I used to lecture the chickens on the evils of pecking each other before I would kill them and the ones that did not peck another chicken got a reprieve from me. I took the time to go catch another of the meaner chickens and cut its head cut off instead. In the same spirit, I tell any gopher that sets up housekeeping in my garden that he had better leave post haste or he will soon come to a sudden end with a wire around his neck. Then if he doesn’t get the hint and leave I trap him. The Black Hole Trap works exceedingly well if one follows the directions. I told this to a close friend who has a bad gopher problem but she was not brought up on a farm like me. This friend of mine has a heart of gold and was shocked to find out that when I said, “I trap any gopher that comes in my garden” that the gopher would end up dead. She thought I was releasing them in the wild.—No way!

But gophers are not on the bottom of my black list. That place is reserved for ground squirrels and rats. In my garden gophers eat more white grubs than plants, but they ruin my rock walls and make mounds in the wrong places, thus they have to go. Rats are far more destructive of plants. They eat roses, bougainvilleas, and Madeira geraniums among other things, but ground squirrels, besides eating tomatoes and other vegetables and fruits and some plants, also carry bubonic plague. My great-grandchildren play in my garden quite often and they are dear to my heart. Thus I want no unclean animals frequenting my premises. Ground squirrels are more disease-ridden than roof rats. I tell ground squirrels they need to leave my garden in a great rush or they will soon meet up with a sudden and untimely death and like other pest animals should choose to reincarnate as a better animals the next time around. This is not totally organic gardening, but in the case of ground squirrels if I ever needed to get rid of one, I would purchase a proper bait box for ground squirrels and the correct bait to go inside it. Always use gloves when handling these baits and keep the box replenished with fresh bait. Follow directions exactly.

If you don’t want to manage your ground-squirrel problem this way and if you don’t care to hire a company to do the job for you, then you will need to plant flowering shrubs, such as plumbago, bougainvillea, callistemon, Solanum rantonnettii, leptospermum, melaleuca, rosemary, and lantana on the bank. All these shrubs and many others can be grown where ground squirrels are located with no problem whatsoever. The roots of these shrubs will hold up the bank. Ground squirrels are vegetarian and they will graze on a lawn like rabbits. They will eat the seed pods of ice plant, and chew at various plants but other than making holes and taking the occasional bite out of plants they really don’t eat to an annoying extent except for food plants. You can’t grow a vegetable garden with squirrels around. They will eat all the tops of the young plants and chomp on the vegetables before you get them.

Ground squirrels prefer open areas of bare land where they can climb up on something low and see all around and sun themselves. Unlike regular squirrels, ground squirrels are not forest animals. If you can thoroughly cover your bank with a thick shrubbery so that all parts of the ground are thickly shaded, then the ground squirrels will be unhappy on your bank. They will go away and find a sunnier area to make their burrows. So maybe there is a magic bullet after all. It just took me a while to figure this out. This is why I don’t have a ground squirrel problem myself, despite the fact they are in my neighborhood. From time to time through the years they have come to my garden but they always go away and never settle down to stay. This behavior does not result from the little lecture on their mortality that I give them but comes from the fact that my garden is surrounded by a thick and shady shrubbery. That’s what ground squirrels detest.

Photo by Dominic’s pics