Kitsune Miko wrote:
Ah Iris,

That might be the ideal, but when you live in an open space zone 9,
there are almost as many cats as squirrels, some ferral. There are
folks out here who even feed the ferral cats. It would take a change
to a city law and even then not all of them would go away. Besides
cats I have racoons and possums roaming the shelves looking for
grubs, not to mention the birds who love to rearange the moss.

Can't do much about the birds. At least, I haven't found anything that
works.

The mammals are a different story, though. I've mentioned it here
before. I make an infusion of hot peppers in grain alcohol. Never quite
the same way or proportions twice; it's all ad lib.

Run the peppers, seeds and all, in my food processor with some grain
alcohol until it ends up a paste. The last batch I made was maybe a
pound of peppers (habanero) and two cups alcohol. After processing, I
put it into a half-gallon canning jar and added about three cups of
vegetable oil and shook it all together. Let it sit for a few days. In a
steel bowl, put maybe a half-gallon of crushed granite and two cups of
the pepper infusion (stir it to distribute the oil and alcohol) and
tossed it to coat the stones. Spread a couple tablespoons of the stone
around each tree. The critters stopped that day. Have to add new pepper
stuff maybe two more times during the season. No furry critters around
the trees. No harm done to them.

Japanese beetles have been a plague this year in the Shenandoah Valley
of Virginia. They seem to especially like my wisteria and honeysuckle.

Pastorio

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