My dear Uncle Ossie needs our help!
Uncle Ossie gardens in Pennsylvania, and when I say gardens, I mean that he gardens!
I grew up watching him and my late Aunt Josie grow and preserve their harvest. I wish I’d gardened years ago the way I do now. It would have been fun to share the love with Aunt Josie.
Uncle Ossie seems to ebb and flow with things that happen in the garden. Sometimes the weather doesn’t cooperate or a neighbor’s tree might block the sun a little bit, but this problem has him stumped.
The raccoons are eating his corn!
I mean decimating it… every year for the past few years.
He’s trapped them, sprayed concoctions on the corn (last year it was made with ghost peppers), and tried other humane ways to move them along, but they keep coming back!
Any ideas out there?
I told him I’d ask you. I know that there are some amazing gardeners who stop in every now and then. One of you must have the raccoon elimination from the corn patch secret!
People still eat corn, don’t they?
Feel free to share my post widely with anyone who might be able to help.
Love and thanks,
Michele and Uncle Ossie
The Salem Garden 
Raccoons are so tough. My brothers did battle for years over the garbage cans and finally got my Dad to relent and let them bring them into the garage for storage. They are stubborn animals. Hope he finds a good solution.
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I wonder if the corn would grow well in the garage? Hmmm… just kidding! Thanks for your comment and good wish, Bailey!
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Well, that is not very hospitable of those crafty creatures after all the hard work of planting and tending. I went to our extension website and this is what they had to offer: Raccoons
• Apply capsaicin spray to ears just before corn begins ripening.
• Fence out with two or three strand electric fence, with strands at 4” and 8” high. Keep down vegetation so system won’t short out.
Our yard is torn up with tunnels of some kind. You walk along and your feet go up and down and the ground squishes under your feet. 😦 Good luck to your Uncle and his corn crop.
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I know, little buggers! I’ll pass these suggestions on! Thanks! I wonder what’s under your ground. moles maybe?
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My sweetheart had a raccoon visiting his garden and so we bought quite a big a trap designed to catch it alive. The box said to bait it with cat food, which we did. Before too long we’d caught a cat, so we decided to give up on trapping. It turns out if we’d have caught a raccoon, that would have been another problem because there is some issue about moving or releasing it. I forget the exact details and I imagine they’d be different for each state. The raccoon appears to have moved on (fingers crossed).
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I have no help for you, but I appreciate the problem. When we lived in the country we had problems with groundhogs. I thought they would not be a problem here in town, but my neighbor had what turned out to be a mama groundhog living under her porch – with three babies. It was a sad sight the day two of the babies wandered into the hav-a-hart, leaving mama and the third baby circling the trap trying to figure out what they were going to do.
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