There is nothing you can do. If you've had that problem before, you'll have it again. Unless you can protect the plants with a cage of chicken wire or something, they will probably destroy any plant you put out there.

Kevin is right, they are the beavers of the rat family and have to chew orchids to keep their teeth from growing through their pin-head brains.

I have many shepherds crook type hanger thingies in my back yard. By hanging the plants off the ground, the skwerls can't get to them and since the hangers are thin metal, they can't climb them. I do have some suspension hooks nailed to the trees such that whatever I hang from them will be hanging out from the tree a couple of feet. The rats can't really get to them.

For the most part, the vermin have been busy destroying the dirt plants in the ground (they decimated my hybrid toad lily and eradicated about four nice hostas), instead of my orchids, this year. Hanging the plants seems to work fairly well.
-MB

Hey MB, another toad lily (Tricyrtis) fan! Love these little guys. Until this year I had a monster T. hirta hybrid that grew 4+ ft tall and bloomed like nuts well into November. Lost that one to front porch reconstruction, but I added T. macropoda, T. ohsumiensis, and another hirta cultivar this year. The latter two are just now gearing up for a big display.

For those who haven't encountered these yet, they are small Asian lily family members with heavily spotted flowers uniformly described as "orchid-like". Well, lily-like to me. Hardy generally to z5, they like shade and moisture, and bloom from roughly early Sept till the frost cuts them down.

Here is a link that might be useful: toad lilies

I LOVE toad lilies too!! I only have two varieties - latifolia 'White Towers' and Tricyrtis x Kohaku, but they are very, very cool and have just starting to pop their buds. I grew both from seed which is very easy to do.

K

Even if you have the plants hanging, squirrels can jump to them from quite a distance. I wouldn't take the chance.

ooh I just got one this year! I can't wait to see it next year when it has a chance to not be a manky nursery flower.

My whole garden it like that this year actually.
It's really hard not to over plant because everythign is so small this year.

This spring I was plagued by ground hogs. They were eating my tomatoes, chewing off the cucumber vines, and lopping off the tops of the orchids. A friend told me that they don't like lime. It gets on their paws, and when they lick their paws they don't like the taste. My neighbor also says she can't put lime out because it gets on her dogs paws, and it burns them.

I bought a bag of hydrated lime (it looks like white flour) and sprinkled it all around the plants, and sure enough, the ground hogs left them alone. The lime may need to be replaced after a heavy rain, but that's no problem.

I also heard that a rag soaked in ammonia also works.

Since dogs and ground hogs don't like the lime, I was wondering if squirrels wouldn't, either. So this fall I'm going to sprinkle the lime under the bird feeders and on the tree limbs, to see if it will deter the greedy tree rats.

Okie-dokie...idea abandoned.
LOL

Heck they will eat everything - if possible get the things that go around the trunk of the trees that prevent them from getting up there in the first place - course they can jump from nothing to nothing. Where I come from they will knock any post down if hungry enough - they even chewed a hole in my roof one year