by Annie Kosterman

Created on: August 16, 2009   Last Updated: October 23, 2009

I owned a house with my, now ex-husband for about 9 years. I had no idea what to do with a yard. I had always rented so I couldn't really do any gardening. But when I got the house, I was ecstatic about the prospects of what I could do. First we had to get rid of all that we didn't want. That included a big pine tree that was planted in the middle of the back yard. ? Right in the middle, nothing around it or anything. Then there was the built in the ground bird bath stone area that we had to dig up. And all of the perennials planted around the yard line.

After spending the summer digging all of this up and out, my mom had bought me a Quaking Ash for the front yard. We liked the tree because it looked like little earrings in the wind and the tree made a soothing sound when the wind blew. So we planted it on the picture window side of the yard so that when it got bigger it would block out the sun from coming into the living room. Which for that summer and the next, while waiting for the tree to get big enough, the sun would heat up the house to over 100 degrees. Thankfully it only took the two summers to grow big enough to block the sun. And when that was planted I dug up the grass with a shovel to make a flower bed to plant my tulip bulbs. It was pretty large in circumference. And I did plant those bulbs.

In the back yard I planted some veggies along the fence; some tomatoes, beans, peas and a row a lettuce. My first garden. As time went on I would check on the progress of my garden and to my surprise, they were all chewed up. The leaves were eaten away and the flower buds were missing. The bulbs that I planted in the front by my tree had been dug up and chewed on. I couldn't figure out why. So I went and bought some more bulbs and plants and re-planted them. Only a few weeks later the same thing.

One day I was using the bathroom and there is a window that looked directly out into the back yard and I was nearly blown away at what I was looking at. Those chipmunk ground squirrels were eating my plants. They apparently lived under the deck we had built in the back along the bordering fence. I couldn't get under there to see if that was for sure the case or not but I was almost certain. So I Googled ground squirrels and found out that they were the culprits in the bulbs being eaten and my veggies getting destroyed.

The next year I planted some more of a variety of bulbs through out the front and back yard and with in a week, they were all dug up and chewed

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