Zucchini Flower

There is a reason for posting this rather lame picture of a zucchini flower and accompanying zucchini. We are doing battle with ground squirrels. Our entire garden is riddled with their tunnels and they ate all the flowers in three pots on our deck. John has been pouring rocks and cement in the holes he finds, but they just dig another one. The final insult was when they every single leaf off every single pepper plant In our raised beds, including the beautiful one brought to us by Travel Photos and Debra last week. (so sorry Alene :-(( All the plants were inside a cage made of chicken wire but they just dug under the bottoms of those. John expanded the chicken wire and nailed it to the side of the box but they still found a way in. They LOVE the leaves of pepper plants They left the tiny purple flowers that were just appearing.

Today our friend Dan came over with a catch and release trap. It is designed for animals the size of skunks and raccoons but he and John spent ages  modifying it in hopes that it will trap smaller varmints. My question is, if we DO catch any, what if it isn't a ground squirrel? And even if it is a ground squirrel what do we do with it? Dan has a plan....

I think there must be whole families settled in under our slope so this promises to be quite a process. We never had ground squirrels until after the fires in 2017 which burned their habitat further up in the hills and drove them down here. We thought the fire that burned through here last year might have gotten rid of them since it burned down all the bushes under which we knew they were nesting, but since we are the only house left standing here they have just moved further into the property, and probably all their friends who were living near the neighboring houses have come to join them here since those houses are gone.

The saga of country living goes on.....

Oh and the zucchini...I took the picture when I went up to see what on earth John and Dan were  doing in our veggie garden. It was heartening to see that ground squirrels don't seem to like tomatoes or zucchini and the zucchini is actually producing fruit and flowers.