I think that skunks dig for grubs living in the soil. Maybe you can coexist with the skunk. You couln't pay me to dig up grubs in your garden, and yet, the skunk is doing it for free.

Can't co-exist with a critter that digs up all my winter-sown seedlings and doesn't even bother to eat them! LOL I'm afraid he might also be eating my earthworms I've worked so hard to attract.

I'm not sure if the skunk is going after earthworms, or grubs. We have both, but no skunk. We do have bunnies, and we have to use a floating row cover to keep them out of the garden, early in the season, when the seedlings are an inch or two high, and very attractive to rabbits.

Okay, I think I'm going to invest in a motion-sensor light. Surely that will scare the whatever out of the skunk. . .I hope!

My experience is that motion sensor lights do little to discourage pests; they just take advantage of the light to see what they are eating better. Skunks are apparently fairly easy to trap with a havaheart trap. You may need to move the filled trap with a stick or hoe, but you also then know what the pest was.

Renais

Try putting some ExLax pieces around your plants. We have hordes of squirrels here and we bought some Walmart brand Equate version of ExLax and put it around iris tubers and tulips. Also kept them out of the veggie garden.

Even though the sqirrels live in our trees, they go to the neighbor's house behind us to pick their tomatoes and peaches. We find half-eaten fruits from the neighbor gardens almost every day. Nothing has been stolen from our garden since we did the ExLax thing 2 years ago.

Seems the little buggers have a pretty good memory and won't come back for more. Sitting in the john all day gives them time to think about what they have done!

This should work for skunks, too. It kept the front neighbors' dogs out of my new plantings near the mailbox.