Call me Mr. McGregor. I am a gardener. I usually grow blackberries, tomatoes, okra, corn, beans, peppers, cucumbers, squash and peas in my garden.
 

 And my yard abounds with wildlife. It teems with squirrels, rabbits and chipmunks. Rabbits love the tender leaves of emerging okra, peas and corn and grow fat from my young plants. Unlike Mr. McGregor, my solution is tea. I make it from habanera peppers — the world’s hottest, forty times hotter than jalapeños. The night after I spray the pepper tea, I often hear rabbits begging for water to ease the pain of their burning lips and tongues. To their timid tap, tap, tappings at my door, I answer, “Nevermore.”
 

Our favorite garden vegetables are tomatoes, and the squirrels’ favorite as well. Just as I do, they wait until tomatoes are at their reddest and juiciest before they eat. They take just a bite or two from each ripe tomato and then move on to the next.

 I could coexist with squirrels if they ate just one tomato at a time but too many squirrel-spoiled tomatoes hang from my vines. Something had to be done. Finally, I found that placing socks on the ripening tomatoes masked the color of the fruit, confusing the tomato-loving little buggers. 

What squirrel has ever heard of a ripe white tomato? It is so satisfying to outwit a squirrel.
 

Because of the rainy spring this year, I planted sweet corn in muddy rows, just poking seed into the ground. The next morning I found a neat little hole at every place a seed had been. Chipmunks!   They had dug up every seed! A second effort yielded the same result. After the third planting, I sprayed each row with pepper tea. 

Chipmunks deserved a hotfoot from the way they have treated me. Same result and not a sore-footed chipmunk in sight.
 

 I covered my fourth planting, some with fine-mesh hardware cloth and some with plastic. The next morning I discovered holes in the plastic and tunnels under the hardware cloth.
 

I set a Have-a-Hart trap and baited it with peanuts. I haven’t caught a single chipmunk even though I shelled the un-cooked nuts for them. Seed corn performed no better. It’s not only butterflies that are free.
 

I am on the road to total defeat. Unless I can think of something else to do I risk a major garden disaster.   But what can I do? The mighty chipmunk owns the night.

 

 Retired pediatrician Bill Fleet now spends his days working with wood (“mostly making sawdust”), fishing (“but not very well”), puttering around his garden and writing. He has lived in Brentwood since 1974. Click here to read his recent columns.