Getting rid of squirrels -- the Jersey way

For as long as I've known him, every summer my dad has planted enough salad vegetables to keep us and a few lucky neighbors in produce for much of the growing season. It's not unique to suburban New Jersey; in fact, many of us keep a small list of people we keep away from in August, just to avoid having to accept bushels of unwanted zucchini.

With gardens, of course, come pests. Dad has never been big on using chemicals or poisons in the garden, and over the years he's found his own ways of dealing with the random bugs, worms and small animals that come calling. One, though, is both persistent and perennial.

The organized crime syndicate of the suburban garden is the squirrel family. They hone their skills in the winter through attempts to steal from my mom's bird feeders. In the summer they escalate to eating the apples (only the ones on the trees, mind you, not the ones that have fallen to the ground). And of course, when they do get to their quarry, they take one bite of the fruit and move on to the next one. Needless to say, it's rather frustrating when you've been watching a particularly nice tomato grow to perfection, only to check the garden in the morning to find it's been sampled by a fluffy-tailed rodent.

Dad has tried many ways to address the problem. Chicken wire did nothing but make the garden look like some sort of detention camp. He set hav-a-heart traps and released the thief into the woods across the street, but it only returned (he swears it's the exact, same squirrel every time). He even went as far as to pull out his old slingshot, which the squirrel laughed at once he realized it would only knock him out for a bit. Dad's a really bright guy, totally sane, but the thought he put into some of the ideas left me wondering if there might be other projects that would benefit from his ingenuity more. Like solving the global warming problem, perhaps.

Then one day he told me he thought he had the solution to the one-squirrel crime wave. Yes, he was still using the trap, but he wasn't releasing the culprit across the street. He was bringing it to another, bigger county park about five miles away. That seemed like a sensible solution for a recidivist squirrel. But I started getting worried when he continued his account of the, uh, disposal.

"I put him and the trap into the trunk," Dad explained, sounding a little like Paulie Walnuts explaining how he and Chrissy got the Russian to the Pine Barrens. "Then I drove around for a bit before I headed to the park, so he'd get disoriented." Between that, the distance and the fact that the park is on the other side of a very busy highway, Dad was reasonably confident that the squirrel wouldn't come back. In fact, I think he even suggested that when the squirrel's family noticed he'd disappeared, they'd think twice about coming into the garden. Little would they know that the capo-di-capo of the Family was living in witness protection.

I guess I should have been relieved it only went that far. My parents do have 'connected' neighbors, and while they aren't the type to ask for favors, who knows what could have happened in exchange for some zucchini flowers and basil.

All I can say is, God forbid a deer gets in the yard.