Chipmunks are certainly cute, and they are entertaining—to the right crowd—but they can also be real nuisances digging, chewing holes in garage doors, and swiping low-lying fruit.
Then there’s the ambivalent in-between state: the cute nuisance. Did you know that chipmunks farm? They regularly cache safflower seeds, which come up like odd little green bouquets in spots along their various runs—in flowerpots, along the north side of the house, and around my garden bench.
I imagine them bustling along with their little chipmunk cheeks stuffed full; digging a little hole in a likely looking, out-of-the-way spot; spitting out all those seeds; and burying them neatly. The problem is those seeds sprout! Early last spring there was a row of little green bouquets poking up through the leaves in the ostrich fern bed under my kitchen window. I suspect those had been cached during the winter.
And winter is coming, even though it is 88° as I write this. The waning days of summer are punctuated with crickets singing and industrious hoarding—which the chipmunks seem to have started first. I noticed last week that a mini-mountain seemed to be developing under my new variegated Solomon’s seal. It erupted into the hugest chipmunk cache I have ever seen. The entire extended family must have worked on building it.
I dug that mountain out this morning, which meant digging up the variegated Solomon’s seal and putting it aside for replanting.
There must have been thousands of seeds, some buried too deeply to sprout. I ended up removing two compost-sieves-full of soil containing a mass of unsprouted seeds and broken seedlings that I put in the compost pile, with the broken-off Solomon’s seal leaves on top.
I replaced that soil with some well-aged compost that I mixed into the soil around it, replanted the variegated Solomon’s seal, and dusted the top of the freshly worked soil with about a quarter cup of cayenne pepper.
It looks worse than it is. There is a sturdy, healthy-looking root with no foliage attached that has been replanted too, so I lost only two of the six plants. Solomon’s seal seems to have resilient, sturdy roots. Considering the tumult the chipmunks caused in this little spot, that’s not bad. I am hoping that the cayenne pepper discourages them in this spot, and that the chipmunks will be more discreet in the future. A smaller seed collection would not have attracted that much human attention.