Havent found a solution and they are destructive especially when looking for food :/ ...Last fall they pulled out most of my plants from their pots, knocked pots over, spread the potting mix everywhere, took hours to clean up etc.

I never see the squirrels or chipmunks when the neighborhood cat is doing his patrol lol. So get a cat, otherwise I recommend building some kind of protective structure to keep them out. Good luck!

Try the motion-activated gadget that sprays a blast of water--they work pretty good. Can't remember the name of it. I think there are a couple different brands.

We are a family of animal hospital employees. As such, my daughter brings home orphaned baby squirrels that fall from nests etc.

She used to release them right outside because being bottle fed & hand reared, she feared they would need support by way of a nest box & food.

Nope. They wild up after a while and the more there are in a litter, the quicker they become difficult to handle as they age.

The first few years, we had several who kept coming back. They sure had a good time tossing my precious gritty mix around. One even took a bite or 2 of one of my baby adenium. It still has the teeth marks =)

There's precious little that can be done. I just keep a dust pan on my patio to re-claim my mix & re-pot as needed. Luckily, the large rocks I use to stabilize the plants discourage them from digging around too much.

Unfortunately, if they are being fed, they will continue to make themselves at home. Once we stopped putting out food for them, they all made their way to greener pastures =)

Ask your neighbor to stop feeding them peanuts. But here is the secret. If you are a man tell the woman next door why you want them to stop feeding them. If you are a woman ask the man next door if they will stop it.

Not sure why that works, but I ( a man ) always talk to the neighbors wife. I think there is just something about the same sex asking for a solution that invokes a no can do attitude.

Before I moved to the house I am live at now I had squirrels that loved to take my Lithops away. I would find them scattered all over the porch.

I must say the best solution has been to have a stray cat colony (All part of the local trap-neuter-return (TNR) program) in the neighborhood I live in. I even live on a national park and I only see squirrels once in a blue moon. I have not had any issues with squirrels messing with my plants since we moved there.

-Erica

Thanks everyone for the replies.

It is so true that the more you try, the more THEY try! Little buggers.

I think my neighbor ceasing to feed them peanuts is out of the question unfortunately. We have asked him many times and he has never stopped; he is really old so and lost his wife so I think it makes him happy to feed them peanuts.

I have noticed some

neighborhood cats but I guess they don't do a good enough job of keeping the squirrels at bay.

I think I am going to try to find something like Hoovb suggested, some sort of motion activated device that is noisy/squirts water when activated. That should do the trick mwahaha

My personal solution is a former Reno street cat I somewhat unwillingly acquired some years back. Darn thing will kill marmots. I only have to worry about deer.

Maybe some kind of mesh cut to fit around the tops of your planters, if you can finangle a way to cut and shape it, and use something ling and flat to burry it into the soil around the edges?

I can also provide a link to a lovely hunter gatherer group that has some tasty sounding squirrel recipes. ;)

I have used hot pepper powder* spread on the soil of outdoor pot plants with some success. I don't agree that it does them any permanent damage or is an inhumane thing to do. I suppose if you pepper sprayed a squirrel in the face, that would be a bit uncalled for, but if you're just putting it on the soil, it will irritate their noses and mouths and they will avoid it. Hot pepper doesn't actually "burn" anybody (otherwise you would have lasting chemical burns in your mouth every time you ate it), it just activates a taste receptor that causes temporary irritation.

* I wanted to make kimchi and bought gochugaru pepper at an Asian market. The kimchi turned out great, but I didn't really need a full two pound bag of hot pepper because I don't make kimchi that often. Turns out the leftover gochugaru came in useful.

AS, the only fool-proof but disgusting solution I have tried is pee. Specifically, man pee. In fact, ask that neighbour to do it, if he can not be asked to stop feeding peanuts to the squirrels.

Husband was willing to do one experiment but was not too keen on evacuating his bladder all over the yard. In the end, I just built a habitat on the elevated deck for my succulents which are all in pots anyway. Squirrels do not dig through pumice or lava rocks though they still sometimes dig into the giant semperviven pot.

Bottom line--give up the territory. You can not win when you are surrounded by upwards of 50 squirrels. Plant something else they can't destroy as easily.

Pagan

I think I have found a solution!!!!! Or at least this solution has worked for two entire days so far!

I covered all of the soil in every planter with decorative stones. That's it! They have not gotten into any of my pots yet! Hopefully this continues to work so I will not have to resort to putting pee on my plants or buying a cat. Lol.

AS

That is the reason I started using gravel topdressing in all pots I keep outside (non-succulents too). After a while, they will try again, but only seldom - maybe 10%...

Telling you guys... get a street cat. Not some cute pet store kitten, but a feline thug. I live at the edge of a woodsy area right across the street from a big river... very picturesque spot really. I see a lot of wild life, but NEVER do I see squirrels or even chipmunks.

Why?

Because I have a murderbeast.

She is a cuddly thing for me, but I occassionally fear for the neighboor's yorkie.

Hahaha!!!!!

I had one of those street hardened kitties! All 22 #'s of him, aptly named 'Gunther'.

He was no joke

Maybe one of those rubber snakes would work. But you would have to move it around every once in awhile, squirrels are smart. We stopped feeding the birds because of them. Hubby bought all these different squirrel-proof feeders and they figured them all out. The last time he wanted to get a different one I told him "look, they are out there in the woods in their lab-coats, using their slide-rules and clipboards as soon as you install one of those, don't bother.

Ha! They are definitely smart enough to get at bird feeders, but perhaps not smart enough to realize they could dig through some rocks if they tried.

I think there is something about just seeing some bare dirt that triggers the urge to dig in their larcenous little rodent minds. I recently witnessed a squirrel, sitting next to a big dish full of sunflower seeds on my patio, take a break from stuffing its face with the seeds to go dig in the soil of nearby plant pots. You know, just in case there was an acorn buried in my parsley plant that it needed to eat right then, when it was in the middle of binging on sunflower seeds. I think a rock mulch to hide the soil sounds like a fine idea.