Fences and Fierce Squirrels

Perhaps you've heard the expression "good fences make good neighbors," but one thing I learned very quickly is that good fences don't necessarily mean that the strawberries won't get stolen by our non-human neighbors.

After Miss Claire and I planted our seedlings we thought all we'd have to do was keep them watered and relatively free of weeds. I vaguely mentioned something about deer, but because I hadn't seen any deer wandering through the neighborhood I promptly forgot about it. As the strawberries began to flower and produce fruit and the tomato vines began to grow, I decided that putting up some chicken wire fencing would be a good idea. My friend Lisa gave us some of the fencing she wasn't going to use this year, and we supplemented it with an additional purchase from Home Depot. After much sweating, cussing, and struggling, we successfully surrounded the two new planting beds with a fortress of wire. The thing is that we didn't have enough fencing left over to cover the strawberry patch, but we were out of time and money for the rest of the week and decided to wait.

Needless to say, by the next day the strawberry plants had been stripped bare of fruit. There was a squirrel sitting on the fence directly above the planting bed, and I swear he grinned at me as if to say, "that was a great snack! Thanks!" I also suspected the robins ... or maybe the local groundhog. Whoever it was, the strawberries were gone. It was a devastating blow to my newfound confidence as a suburban gardener, but I promised myself that I would be victorious. They're just squirrels, right?