Posted on 03/14/2010 6:00:25 PM PDT by Cindy
I can understand deer and other wild animals looking for an easy meal and I can understand cattle looking to roam and possibly seek greener pastures.
But, I cannot understand my Mother’s neighbors (where the garden is located) sneaking, in the middle of the night, into the garden to steal cucumbers.....
The fence will be more for them, than anything else.
A friend of mine showed me how to set it up and do all of wiring. If I string six paralell wires around the entire garden area...it will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1/2 of a mile of wire.....
He gave me a 15 mile fencer to go with it.
Should be fun......
A variety of Sunflower seeds is a good idea.
I know I try new types each year and some are better growers than others.
LOL
Crumbs…We don’t have quail and pheasant here in Panama. We just have houseflies between January and March. Any recipes for houseflies?...Maybe a cream soup or something with mushrooms?
Panama is very Americanized. It also celebrates Thanksgiving with turkey although they don’t know what the heck Thanksgiving is all about. But that’s OK. They enjoy the festivities too without knowing anything about it, which is OK by me.
After all, they import their turkeys from the U.S.
Sounds like a good plan.
“Any recipes for houseflies?”
Screen doors?
Or squirrels.
I tried the bird thing once and finally gave up, with a hat tip to the squirrels dogged determination and willingness to risk life and limb to pilfer my seeds. I had a feeder hanging on a wire high off the ground and six feed below a limb. They easily jumped down from above.
I decided to make a game of it and started using angle cut binding wire to surround the feeder with sharp barbs. No matter, little buggers would take turns sacrificing themselves and getting cut up, then dish the seeds to their pals below. I would record the incidents on a video camera to study their technique, then rearrange and add barbs. When I was done, my bird feeder looked like a no man's zone at a concentration camp. It didn't matter. Nothing would deter them.
There is a cayenne pepper product that you can add to your seed. It doesn’t deter the birds, for some reason and it stops squirrels and other rodents from coming back.
I tried live trapping a groundhog that was living under a former girlfriend’s front porch. It was digging out everything under her wooden front steps. Couldn’t get it to walk into the trap....
I had grown a large crop of cayenne and other hot peppers in her garden. We dried them out and run them through an old coffee grinder that she had picked up at a garage sale for a dollar. We spread the powder beneath the porch and all around it. Heavy. He got it on his paws and tried to lick it off and NEVER came back again....
I tried it. The birds wouldn't touch it. The squirrels didn't mind it at all.
The Birds
This spring we put out a bird feeder. For the first few weeks, we were visited by many kinds of colorful birds as shown in the pictures below. At first the feeder had to be refilled once a week. Then it became twice a week, then three time per week, and finally every day. We also noticed that there was no more variety, just one species and dozens of them at a time. The evergreen trees that separate our lot from the neighbors was infested with them. They lived in these evergreens, except when they flew to our feeder 50 yards away. I told my family that these birds were welfare birds living on the free handout of birdseed. Then I heard Rush Limbaugh talking about San Francisco having a huge homeless problem that they created by providing more and more soup kitchens and sleeping places. The homeless have migrated to SF because of the abundant handouts. That’s when I realized that our birds weren’t welfare birds, they were homeless birds.
Needless to say but we no longer stock the bird feeder. They did do something besides living in our evergreens and eating the birdfeeder dry every day. They deposited their dropping all over the deck and the noise from the evergreens was a real racket. Don’t tell the neighbors that the bird noise was our fault. What they don’t know won’t hurt them.
Huh....we had the opposite result....
No screen doors in Panama for safety reasons; hence, the houseflies aren’t too happy about it and have filed a complaint with the Panamanian authorities. The fly community has a class action suit, and their lawyer is Greg Craig.
And, actually, I saw a bird that I had never seen before, or since.....
Some sort of a cross-bill...
P.S.
Greg Craig is a mango tree lawer.
Anyone have an idea for keeping opossums off the deck? We put one of those "corn-cob" feeders out because we felt sorry for the squirrels, but I watched a possum practically eat the whole thing one night. We also left out old apples on a stake for the orioles and that guy took off with it, too! Guess all God's critters have to eat!
Smiling at you.
I can’t believe the gall of people that would sneak a neighbor’s garden produce. An electric fence might make them want to sue if they get “hurt”. What about automatic search lights that go on with movement?
Well, the garden is in my Mother’s yard. I don’t live there. I can’t monitor it 24/7.
Trespassing and theft is still illegal, AFAIK.....
I’m going to back up my electrified security with a couple of digital trail-cams, in order to prove criminal activity....as well as to document some hilarious DC induced break-dancing......
We grow sunflowers in N. MN at my friend’s lakeshore place for no other reason than to watch the deer walking the shoreline and getting a free meal....
And, once in a while, we get a hungry bear....
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