Defeating the rodents

Sweet Tatorman's picture

At the end of each gardening year I typically sit down with a glass of wine and review my gardening journal with an eye towards what I have learned in the current year. I find this an aid in remembering useful lessons for the long term. A couple of items noted may be of some interest to the gardening folks here on the forum. I'll discuss one in this post and the other in a separate later post.

Defeating the rodents

It is typical to have a certain degree of predation on planted corn seed. This year was particularly problematic starting with my third sweet corn planting. Usually I think crows are the culprits but this year the pattern was different. Crows will typically pull up the seed by the shoot once it has emerged from the surface. This year seed was being dug up from above within 24 hrs of being planted. Some type of rodent suspected but culprits never seen in action. While voles are common here my experience is that their plant mayhem is from below, not from the surface. This leaves field mice and squirrels as the possible culprits, both of which are plentiful here. Since my planting method does not leave a visual indication of seed location, it would appear that they were being located for digging by other means. Since neither suspect species is sufficiently technologically advanced to have ground penetrating radar or its equivalent, location by smell though ~1" of soil cover was the only apparent alternative. For my next planting I planted half the rows at the usual ~1" depth and the other half at ~2" and noted the results. A higher number of the 1" plantings were dug up but some of the 2" ones were also dug up. If smell was the method of location, 2" soil was insufficient to mask. For my next planting I planted 4 rows with exactly 16 seeds per row all at ~2" depth. One row was planted is the usual manner, the remaining 3 rows were sprinkled with cornmeal at a rate of about 1 cup per 30' of row ground at the coarsest setting of the grinder. Results: the ultimate stand in the untreated row was 3 out of 16. The three rows treated with cornmeal had an ultimate stand of 38 out of 48 with none of the void locations due to seed being dug up. My takeaway is that the cornmeal treatment is effective against this particular form of corn seed predation.

ClareBroommaker's picture

That's pretty clever, Sweet Tatorman-- both the deeper planting and the corn meal. Do you suppose there is a chance that corn stalks and stubble from the previous year might help in a similar way?

Sweet Tatorman's picture

I don't know if the stalks and stubble would be helpful in a corn-corn rotation. In my case I generally do not plant corn in shorter than a 3 year rotation. At that length of time any crop residue would have long since been recycled by soil organisms.

David Trammel's picture

Great thought. I wonder what the amount of corn needed to make the corn meal would be?

I've had squirrels dig up my onion sets in the past, though they don't seem to eat them. I wonder if a sprinking of corn meal would confuse their sense of smell enough to prevent that.

Sweet Tatorman's picture

For my experiment I used about 1 cup for 30' of row. Volume expands only slightly upon grinding, perhaps by 10% or so. I suspect even less would have worked. Since I suspect the mechanism at play is the odor of corn masking the odor of corn. I doubt it would work on onions which smell different. You might try bits of chopped onion instead.