Groundhog Wars

March 20th, 2008

A groundhog looking for dinner.

   For all you gardeners wanting to attract wildlife to the landscape this season, I have one bit of advice.

   Plant a vegetable garden.

   You’ll have a zoo full of critters in no time.

   Well fed ones, too.

   Of course, that’s not good news if you’re growing vegetables that YOU actually hope to eat.

   In that case, prepare for voles and chipmunks to steal your seeds as fast as you plant them.

   Prepare to see your baby beets, lettuce and spinach neatly decapitated by rabbits.

   Prepare for raccoons to ravage your corn, for birds to peck holes in your ripening tomatoes and for a surprise deer to polish off whatever’s left.

   But you know you’re really in trouble when a groundhog shows up.

   This fat, little fur-ball with razors for teeth is the tornado of garden pests.

   Groundhogs don’t nibble or pick around a garden.

   No. Instead of eating, say, three of your cabbages, a groundhog will gnaw down all 12 of them about halfway.

   It makes you wonder if they’re really just hungry or doing this to prove who’s boss.

   On that point, I’ll concede.

   Your basic groundhog might not look like the brightest bulb in the pack, but the ones in my yard have outwitted me for 20 years now.

   When I first started vegetable-gardening, I took no chances.

   I built a virtual palace around my raised beds, erecting a split-rail fence backed with vinyl-coated fencing and surrounded by sunken boards to keep out the burrowing pests.

   Fort Knox was less secure.

   I would’ve dug a moat, but I couldn’t find a local alligator supplier.

   The system worked pretty well… except for the slipup when I stacked firewood at one corner of Fort George, allowing Mr. Groundhog to climb up, over and into the bean patch.

   Eventually, my gardening shifted from production mode to a more ornamental phase.

   The fence and rails came down, and a nifty four-square, Williamsburg-style garden went in. It’s lined with shrub roses and boxwoods and has stone paths criss-crossing into a central circle planted with rhubarb and herbs.

   The animal kingdom found out about this new open-door policy in no time.

   They must have a blog or something. I’ll bet Punxsutawney Phil is the webmaster.

   Anyway, I’ve managed to scare away, scent-repel and spot-protect against everything except for the groundhogs that cavort in at meal time from their dens in neighboring yards.

   No matter what I do, the groundhogs stay one step ahead.

   Last summer, I thought I had them beat by erecting a sturdy fence around the raised beds that were planted with groundhog-favorite beans. I even left the top loose so they wouldn’t have support to climb up and over.

   Nimbly, one small groundhog pushed the bottom of the fence apart enough from the edging board to tunnel under.

   Goodbye beans.

   So I decided to tack down the entire base of the fence with 6-inch-long metal pegs called “earth staples.”

   Soon after new beans sprouted, I went out one morning and found the poor baby plants chewed and flattened like one of those British crop circles. I found two staples yanked out and tossed on the path near a new tunnel into the bean patch.

   Since when do groundhogs have finger dexterity? Or do they carry little pry bars?

   At that point, I still thought I was smarter. So I set bricks all around the edge.

   “Let’s see them move one of these!” I thought.

   A few days later, the beans were nubs again.

   No tunnels this time, but I’m suspicious that a gymnastic female groundhog used the bricks as a launching pad to get up and over.

   (It had to be a female because by now a male would have given up and called out for pizza.)

   The only other logical explanation is that groundhogs have discovered parachutes.

   So as spring arrives today, I look to a new growing season with hope but trepidation.

   My Havahart cage trap is ready to de-groundhogify, and I’m fully prepared to move onto more aggressive methods if the gluttonous rodents soon don’t get the message.

   I’d even settle for a compromise – half for me, half for them.

   We’ll see.

   But I’m beginning to think that my best hope is that the groundhogs will eat so much that they grow too fat to get out of their burrows.

 Anti-groundhogging options

   Not that any of these are guaranteed to work, but here are some ways to do battle with groundhogs:

   * Fence them out. Bury the bottom down a foot and out a foot (L shape) to discourage burrowing. Leave the top foot of a 3- to 4-foot fence loose to remove climbing support.

   * Install an electric fence. Two strands ought to do it at about 4 and 6 inches off the ground.

   * Use a large cage trap and lead a trail of cantaloupe rinds into it. Apples and fresh cabbage are other good baits. Close traps at night so you don’t catch something else.

   * Hire a wildlife control professional to trap and remove groundhogs for you.

   * Put a dog on patrol near the vegetable patch, preferably one trained not to dig up vegetables himself.

   * Use repellents. Fox and bobcat urine are two of the better ones. Others: muslin bags of blood meal; unwashed clothes; hot-pepper spray and other commercial animal repellents; pie tins with ammonia-soaked sponges, dog hair.

   * Use a sprinkler, light or radio hooked up to a motion sensor. (First consider potential annoyance to neighbors.)

   * Seal all but one den hole (there are usually two or three), light and insert a commercial gas cartridge in the open hole, then seal behind to trap poisonous gas.

Groundhog riddle

   How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

   The answer’s easy.

   None.

   Because he’d be too busy eating your vegetable garden to the ground.