by Lorelei Cohen

Created on: July 25, 2007

Squirrels squirrel away food. They pack it away, hide it, store it, bury it and then dig it out again on a rainy day. If you are a dog than this squirrel madness is just great. Our dog spends a great deal of her day sniffing out the little patches of 3 or 4 dog food kernels that are strategically buried throughout our property. She loves having her food source turned into a game of hide and seek. But then there is me and my idea of what I want buried and where.

Now believe me when I say that I really and truly do like squirrels. I love hearing them chatter as they go about their day and I go about mine. I love watching them leap around from tree to tree, from tree to bird feeder, and back again. However this burying habit of the local squirrels does cause a little inconvenience in other ways. They tend to ignore my idea of a wilderness garden and tend to create their own.

Now my basic idea for my wilderness garden was to have my vegetable garden next to the house and then to plant a mix of herbs and flowers that flowed in a pathway down toward the entrance of our property. Here they would spread out along the banks of the driveway and continue out and along the highway in both directions till they reached the end of our property line. I toted what felt like a gazillion rocks to create a natural rock garden effect in and around both my vegetable garden and amongst my flower beds. I transplanted wild roses from the vegetable bed to the flower bed whenever I found them creeping in where they were not supposed to be, and I purchased and planted a never ending supply of perennials so the flowers would bloom at different times of the season, and in a continuous cycle of one upon the other . The wild roses and daisies that bloomed on our property added a natural mix to my purchased blooms and this combination of natural as well as wild flowers, added to the herb plants to create an amazingly beautiful field of color. My father brought me a number of shoots from his lilac bush and I added them into my natural floral arrangement. They wouldn't bloom till the following year but that was okay. I was visualizing my gardens as they would look five to ten years in the future. Things seemed to be coming along just as I planned for them this first year.

That is until about a hundred sunflowers plants started opening their heads. Now what I soon discovered was that by giving the squirrels free run to the sunflower seed in my bird feeder I was actually telling them to "go plant

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