Six a.m., the sleepy homeowner goes out to get the paper and arrgghh!! his yard has been ripped apart. Something or someone has come in the night and torn his lovely flowers out by the roots and discarded them like weeds! Who would do such a thing? Possums that's who! Those nighttime vandals roaming unprotected suburban yards scrounging for their dinner of snails, slugs and worms. I only wish they would eat the snails, but lately they're after my earthworms, the good guys in my garden.
Carefully we replant the begonias and tamp down the soil churned up by the vandals. Cruising the internet for solutions to the problem offers small hope. You could get yourself some coyote urine and spray it around. But you'd have to find a coyote to pee in a cup. Fat chance. You can grind hot pepper flakes and anything else that burns your tongue, put it in water and spray the ground. Great, we can do that. Done.
Next morning striding out to inspect our domain we are dumbfounded if not really pissed off to discover that the vandals apparently have a taste for hot sauce and once again have pulled the begonias out by the root ball. They must be Mexican possums liking Tabasco as much as they do.
Time for a serious solution. Stake the dog out in the yard and let him scare the rodents away! Nah, he'd just bark all night. Arsenic! Where do you get it? What would we do with the carcasses? So no not arsenic. But right now it sounds pretty good. Only good possum is a dead possum at this point.
So tonight we're trying a solution that worked with ducks in our pool. We're taking a children's blow up pool toy with a long neck and big black eyes and staking it near the plants to wave gently in the night breeze. The ducks were afraid of it and possums can't be much smarter than ducks can they?
Now I know vandal possums aren't an earth shattering problem but at least I have hope that there is one problem in the world I can solve, keeping my begonias alive. I don't have a hope in hell of solving any of the other problems in the world today. So keep your fingers crossed for my poor begonias. May they last through the night.
I heard a story once about a woman trying to keep the deer from eating her plants. She scattered coyote urine soaked cotton balls all over, but they kept disappearing. She finally spotted the culprit(s). Hummingbirds, who apparently cannot smell, or don't dislike eau de coyote urine, were using them for their nests.
ReplyDeleteBut for possums, have you considered Billy Bass? Of course, your neighbors might vandalize you if put up an obnoxious singing fake fish.