Will Rogers is usually credited with saying, “Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.” By that measure, this fall made me very wise. I have the half-eaten beet greens to prove it.
Fall is here
Around the time I started wearing a jacket to the coop in the mornings, the greenhouse started losing plants. I wasn’t the only one who noticed the weather turning. Animals feel fall coming before we do. Mice go looking for somewhere warm to spend the winter. Squirrels spend October eating anything they can reach so they’ll have some fat on them by the first freeze. Even the bugs go hunting for shelter. And a 20 by 20 greenhouse full of tender greens, a few degrees warmer than everything around it, looks like a very nice hotel with the buffet already set out.
The chard went first, chewed down to ragged edges. Then the radish bed. One plant was bitten clear down to stubs, which is the kind of thing you look at for a long time before you go get coffee.
I set some traps
I had seen a squirrel hanging around outside the greenhouse door, looking like he had a lease. So I did what any reasonable woman does. I bought traps. Several of them.
A small two-door live cage. A snap trap. And a bucket trap with a yellow flip lid and two little ramps, the kind of setup you build after watching too many videos at 10 o’clock at night. I baited all of them and waited.
The squirrel didn’t go near any of them. The bucket, though, caught mice. Lots of mice. Every morning there were new ones looking up at me like I was the one who’d done something wrong. The trap worked great. It just had no interest in the animal I built it for.
The Beetles
Then I started seeing the beetles. Big black ones, about an inch long, walking around the greenhouse floor like they paid rent too. When I got close, one stopped, put its head down, and stuck its rear end straight up in the air at me.
That’s a darkling beetle, sometimes called a stink beetle. The headstand is a warning. It means “come any closer and I will make this smell bad for both of us.” They’re out at night, mostly eating dead plant material, but they’ll also chew seedlings and soft leaves when they get the chance. A lot of the small holes I’d been blaming on the squirrel were probably theirs.
For the beetles I used diatomaceous earth, the food grade kind sold as fossil shell flour. It’s ground up from fossilized algae, and under a microscope the pieces are sharp enough to scratch through a bug’s waxy coat so it dries out. It’s harmless to the chickens, which matters around here. The catch is that it only works while it’s dry, so every time I water I have to dust again. I am getting very good at dusting.
How he was getting in
So now I knew about the mice and the beetles, but something bigger was still eating my greens. I finally got down on my knees by the door and found it. The plastic next to the door frame had pulled loose at the bottom corner and torn, leaving a gap right at ground level. The dirt under it was packed down smooth, like a path that had been used for weeks while I walked right past it.
I sealed it shut with a piece of wood. If you have a greenhouse, make sure it’s sealed tight before the cold sets in. Walk the whole thing and check the bottom corners, around the door frame, and anywhere the plastic meets wood. A gap you could slip two fingers through is plenty for a mouse, and a squirrel doesn’t need much more. It’s a lot easier to patch a hole in October than to evict a tenant in November.
Round two
Even with the door fixed, I figured the squirrel had already moved in for the season, so I went back to the store. The little cage I’d been using was really a mouse trap. This time I came home from Cal Ranch with a Havahart one-door squirrel trap, the kind made for animals his size.
A few days later, there he was. A rock squirrel, big and gray-brown with a speckled coat, sitting on the trip plate in the back of the cage. He looked at me like I’d ruined his whole afternoon, which I suppose I had.
We drove him five miles out to the forest and let him go. He ran off without looking back. Honestly, he has a lot of nerve.
What I’d tell you
If you think you’ve got a squirrel in your greenhouse this fall, he may not be working alone. Mine turned out to be a squirrel, a bucket’s worth of mice, and a crowd of beetles, and the squirrel got all the blame because he was the only one I ever saw. Check your doors and corners before you buy anything. Get a trap that fits the animal you’re after. And keep a bag of diatomaceous earth around, because the beetles are not leaving on their own.
The greens are coming back. The bucket still catches a mouse now and then. And somewhere five miles away, a rock squirrel is telling his friends about the greenhouse with the free salad bar. I’d like to tell you I have good judgment now. What I have is experience, a patched greenhouse, and a bag of diatomaceous earth.
— Pearl
Leave a Reply