I have always had a soft spot in my heart for chipmunks. Sure, they are rodents, but so are squirrels and rabbits, and with their brown and white fur and dorsal racing stripes, they are, in a word, cute. At least, they WERE cute before they started terrorizing my garden. At mediaOrganic, 2011 will forever be remembered as the year of the chipmunk.
We have lived on our property since 1997 and have see the chipmunk population wax and wane. Some years they were so sparse that only one or two sightings occurred all year. This year I have them chasing each other around my garden, oblivious to the fact that I am standing five feet away watching them.[ad#page-inline]
And boy do they love tomatoes. I first noticed this phenomenon last year when I began to find tomatoes that looked as if a deer had taken a bite from them. Problem was, I couldn’t figure out how a deer could squeeze it’s head into the center of a tomato cage to take one bite without doing a lot more damage. And why would a deer leave half a tomato? This year the same problem started recurring and I soon realized that my chippy friends were at the center of the mayhem.
To say that this is annoying is to put it mildly. The chipmunks have eaten or ruined more tomatoes than we have harvested this year. And they are attracted to them when they are just starting to ripen, so no vine ripened tomatoes for the humans this year. We have to pick everything at the first blush and ripen them on the counter. The most maddening of all is that they will eat portions of multiple fruits, ruining them all. My wife says they’re like a bunch of teenagers – eating half an apple and throwing the rest away. I say they are being frighteningly shrewd and know that once they’ve taken a bite it’s theirs to keep.
So now chipmunks are no longer cute and furry denizens of our yard. They are just Rodents with a capital “R”, another garden pest to be dealt with.
Try lining your garden with copper, I had a piece of old welding lead that I stripped and put it around my 3 foot high fenced garden. It kept all rodents out except for the baby bunnies, so I put 12″ chicken wire to keep them out. Good luck.
Grateful thanks are in order for those ripened toamtoes i’ve been able to enjoy. I’m guessing there’s a plan a-mind as to how to address any occurance for the next palnting season.
I had a similar problem with squirrels one year. It nearly drove me crazy… the yard littered with tomatoes that had one bite taken out of them. AAARRRRRGGGGG!!! If you’re gonna ruin it, at least eat it for heaven’s sake!
I bought a bunch of chicken wire and built crazy cage-like contraptions around the plants. I’m not sure if it helped or not, but it certainly provided entertainment for the neighbors!