Am I allowed to hate squirrels? (How ’bout if I just feed them instead?)

I don’t talk about my gardening all that much, but I have mentioned my ongoing squirrel problem.

Well, this time the little bastards have gone too far. They have targeted my delicious, beloved tomatoes. Tomatoes are not easy to grow in a yard in the shadow of a large Black Walnut tree, so I have had to painstakingly raise them in pots kept insulated from the ground by heavy plastic (lest they be contaminated by the tomato toxin juglone), and I regularly have to inspect the soil for fallen walnut leaves, which contain the same toxin. This summer, I have been a lot luckier than last summer, and while I’ve been enjoying my tomatoes, the squirrels have beaten me to it in many cases.

Damn them!

Was that hate speech? I don’t know, but it would be one thing if they actually ate the tomatoes for nourishment. That I might be able to understand, even if I would be furious. And if they only preyed on ripe tomatoes, that I could also sort of understand. But these fiendish creatures don’t eat them; they vandalize them. And they don’t want ripe tomatoes. Instead, they’ll sadistically wait until they’re almost ripe, then take a few bites out of them, like this:

That forces me to harvest them early and cut off the damaged portions.

While they sit there and watch, acting as if they own the yard and they’re just waiting for me to go back inside to escape the high heat:

Coco is very little help. Sure, she chases them when she’s in the yard, but she can’t catch them, and she can’t be there all the time. Lots of people suggest shooting, but I am in a crowded urban area with a small yard, and I can’t. Trapping is a waste of time; they are smart and avoid traps, and there are just scads of them, so even if you managed to trap and relocate, another intruder would immediately take over the “abandoned” turf.

It occurred to me that being emotional was a complete waste of time, and that I needed to think of a solution along the lines of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em!”* I was a bit inspired by a comment in response to the vexing question of how to keep them away:

At least I havn’t found away to yet. The biggest cause for this I find is lack of rain. They are thirsty. They don’t like tomatoes but will take one bite out of them to get the juice and leave the rest. You can try leaving some bowls of water around the garden for them this might help.

I thought, why not leave them some food that they like more than tomatoes, but in such a way that they have to work to get it? I have a lot of black walnuts which I collected and shucked last fall but never shelled because it’s a lot of work, and they’re a bit rancid. So I put some of them into a cage which I wrapped with chicken wire, and left in a plastic container with a water dish and a deceptive sign:

It has not worked 100%, but it has dramatically slowed them down. They’re making off with the walnuts I don’t want! Plus, in a win-win, that awful walnut tree is inadvertently being forced to help the tomatoes it wants to kill.

Too bad the same principle can’t be applied to politics.

*If you can’t hate ’em, feed ’em!