My years of experience of trying to keep critters from eating my garden stuff goes like this:
groundhogs - eat sweet potatoes, young cabbage family plants
deer - eat sweet potatoes, pepper plants, cantaloupes, apples
squirrels (gray squirrels not fox squirrels) - eat the seeds inside your pears, and occasionally other weird stuff like tomatoes.
Which has led us to referring to fox squirrels as "good squirrels" and gray squirrels as "tree rats".
turtles - eat cucumbers, cantaloupes
rabbits - occasionally, but rarely eat young pea plants, I really don't have problems with the local rabbits.
Raccoons - will eat your corn, in fact they will even sample it to see if it's ready, before they come around and lay waste.
best solutions for a unfenced garden - hot wire, placed at waist high for deer and 6 inches off the ground for ground critters. If the deer are suburban deer, they can be very smart - like learning to jump a hot wire. So in the past, I have resorted to 2 hot wires placed 4 feet apart so they can't jump over both.
My years of experience of trying to keep critters from eating my garden stuff goes like this:
groundhogs - eat sweet potatoes, young cabbage family plants
deer - eat sweet potatoes, pepper plants, cantaloupes, apples
squirrels (gray squirrels not fox squirrels) - eat the seeds inside your pears, and occasionally other weird stuff like tomatoes.
Which has led us to referring to fox squirrels as "good squirrels" and gray squirrels as "tree rats".
turtles - eat cucumbers, cantaloupes
rabbits - occasionally, but rarely eat young pea plants, I really don't have problems with the local rabbits.
Raccoons - will eat your corn, in fact they will even sample it to see if it's ready, before they come around and lay waste.
best solutions for a unfenced garden - hot wire, placed at waist high for deer and 6 inches off the ground for ground critters. If the deer are suburban deer, they can be very smart - like learning to jump a hot wire. So in the past, I have resorted to 2 hot wires placed 4 feet apart so they can't jump over both.