Outside Looking In

As I wrote about last year, an annoying woodpecker got the best of me and my house last fall. The bird pecked holes in several placed in the wood siding. Several friends and neighbors seemed to have a different solution to the problem, all costing me money and none of them working.
Online remedies included diluted hot sauce in a spray bottle. After filling all the holes with wood filler and then painting them, I bought a spray bottle and some tabasco sauce, diluted it and sprayed in the area that the woodpecker seemed to favor. Unfortunately, the spray had no affect. I then made a higher concentrate and tried again. Strike two.
I decided not to dilute the hot sauce at all but it was too thick to spray out of the bottle, so I climbed a step ladder on my split-level home and physically poured the hot sauce in several areas. My blue house had red streaks running all down the sides as the woodpecker sat on a nearby branch and watched ... and probably laughed.
It's illegal to shoot woodpeckers, but I was at my breaking point and took aim anyway with my BB gun. The woodpecker seemed to sense my finger on the trigger and flew away every time before I could take a shot. Eventually, the weather turned cold and I now eagerly await his return this fall.
This brings me to a new problem I have encountered this summer. I have an abundance of trees in my back yard, allowing very little sunlight. Because of this, I am only able to have a small corner garden for the past 10 years that includes two or three tomato plants, a couple pepper plants, cucumbers, and a few small rows of peas. I usually get enough of a harvest each year to make it worthwhile.
This year, the woodpecker apparently holds classes on how to be annoying and one of his students got high marks.
A few days after planting the tomatoes, a critter of some sort chewed one of them in half. I had problems in the garden with the rabbits eating the sweet peas in past years, so I built a four-foot fence around the garden and that solved the problem.
Figuring this was a one-time thing since tomato stalks are bitter and whatever animal gnawed on it, probably didn't want seconds. Wrong. A couple of days later, the entire plant was chewed down to the ground, while the other tomato plant was fully intact.
Of course, friends and neighbors again had all kinds of solutions to the problem. "Put dog hair around the garden, put a fake owl in the garden, put pinwheels around the garden," were some of the suggestions.
I noticed small tracks and half of a walnut shell in the garden and my best Sherlock Holmes investigation deduced that it was a squirrel. There are several squirrels in the neighborhood, but I didn't realize they would eat the stalk of a tomato. I checked online and was surprised when a squirrel was listed as a likely culprit.
I didn't want to shoot the squirrels and I didn't want to have a yard full of pinwheels and plastic owls, so I made a trip to Menards and purchased a $15 spray bottle of critter repellent. I used about half of the bottle spraying the entire garden and then realized the spray smelled like an unclean litter box.
The garden was gremlin free over the next two days so I replaced the missing tomato plant. I watered the entire garden that night and then came out the next morning to find the other tomato plant had been eaten. It was baffling as to why the squirrel, or whatever the animal was, had not touched the peas or other plants that are less bitter.
Watering the garden must have diluted the critter repellent so I used the remaining liquid in the bottle and sprayed the entire garden again. Two days later, it rained and both tomato plants and all four cucumber plants were completely gone.
I gave up and decided it wasn't worth another $15 bottle of spray, but I continued to water what was left in the garden, which was now reduced to two green pepper plants, one jalapeno plant, and the four rows of peas.
Fast forward to current times and everything in the garden is now wiped out except for the peas. Apparently, squirrels are not pea lovers.
I've figured out the solution to the entire garden problem by myself. It's much less work, less money and less stress, I figured, just to go to the store or a farmers market and buy a few vegetables.
As for the woodpecker problem, if he returns to his pecking ways in the fall? I'll mash up some peas and spread them on the house. Since the squirrels hate peas, maybe woodpeckers hate them, too.