Some of you who have followed this blog for a long time might remember my problems with groundhogs. There was the time when one of them crawled into the engine compartment of my truck, ripped the insulation off the hood and chewed my rubber hoses. Unlucky for him, he was still in the vicinity of the fan when I started the truck one morning. Took a mechanic an hour to extract his corpse. Serves him right.
Then there was the ground hog who lived under my deck, who, when he wasn't chewing the siding off my house, was eating every last vegetale from my garden. Not a single tomato made it to my plate that summer. I tried to shoot him, but he was a quick little bugger; I never got a shot off.
This year, I'm putting in a garden, but I've learned my lesson. I've surrounded it with a 4-foot-high wire fence with a gate... a locked gate. I'm also considering pounding re-bar into the ground all around it to create a subterranean fence to prevent the furry fiend from burrowing in. I'm stopping short of surveillance cameras and a security guard.
I'll let you know how it turns out.
After 37 years in the newspaper business, O-R Editor Park Burroughs may have a right to be grumpy. He answers questions and complaints from readers here daily, and often chimes in with gripes of his own, observations, book reviews and serialized stories.
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Park Burroughs is editor of the Observer-Reporter. All content on this blog is Copyright 2009, Observer Publishing Co. Washington, PA. 1998-2009
3 comments:
If your efforts don't work, I can bring my dogs out. They're experts at creating a groundhog-free zone. ;-)
It sounds like an excellent plan. Good luck. Please keep us posted as to your progress. There are no groundhogs where I live; however, there must be other gardeners there who have encountered the same pesky groundhog problem- perhaps they might offer their advice. I'd also ask whoever you buy plants from; it would behoove them for you to be successful. I think Brant's idea would help if you fenced in your yard and agreed for you to board his dogs for the duration of the growing season.
My neighbors have a shed... under which live two very large whistle pigs...
I am hesitant to "take care" of these creatures because, as a typical American, I have never so much as exchanged 2 words with said neighbors and I am not entirely sure that they don't WANT said varmint living beneath said shed... I am afraid if I dispatch them, I will have all sorts of conversations with "those people" and I am really not in the mood to make friends right now :-)
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