Bushy-tailed tree rats

A poor unripe tomato eaten before its time

Our new Obnoxious Garden Pest of the Day is only theoretical at this point. I've seen the damage but not the perpetrator. For the past week or so, every one of my tomatoes of a certain size is ripped from the vine and partially eaten. What I find particularly galling is not that something is stealing my tomatoes, but that whatever is doing it, is so wasteful and so audacious as to leave a tomato minus two tiny little bites laying right in the middle of my garden.

Artists rendering of the suspect (not to scale)

I'm fairly certain that the only giant bug capable of this sort of thing is a squirrel, but I haven't been able to get a picture of one. Now, if you are anything like me (doubtful), you have been under the apparently false impression that squirrels only eat fast food, like Chik-fil-a or Wendy's, that they steal from unsuspecting UT students enjoying the nice spring weather at lunchtime, or they scavenge leftovers from campus garbage cans. I suppose the squirrels in my neighborhood are too far from campus for that to be a sustainable lifestyle so, instead, they go for the next best thing to trans-fat and empty calories, my unripe tomatoes.

Bathtub pepper spray

This is a problem that may take some creative trouble-shooting (no pun intended for my fellow Texans, shooting things in my backyard is not a precedent I want to start in my neighborhood). Currently, I'm trying something that was originally intended as an organic insecticide that was passed on to me by Andrew, The Nearly Constant Gardener's Southeast Texas Correspondent, formerly our South American Agricultural Extension Agent (don't get bogged down in the titles, I set-up a baffling bureaucracy for this blog for legal/tax purposes). I think Andrew picked it up from the Qichwas of the Ecuadorean jungle in between being incapacitated on Chicha, a local spirit made from fermented crone saliva (as I understand it).

Anyway, the idea is simple: chop up a very hot pepper (I used a habanero) and soak it in a cup or so of water overnight. Then, strain the liquid into a spray bottle and spray on offending pests. Be warned, this stuff is potent. Aerosolized capsicum is not be trifled with so don't spray into a crowd or into the wind.  I've tried it on bugs this week with mixed results. It worked splendidly on some leaf-footed bug nymphs. But, when tested on a caterpillar, it was clearly uncomfortable but not dead after a few minutes. So my plan is to spritz all of my growing tomato fruits with this pepper spray twice a day and hope that our squirrels don't have a taste for spicy foods.