What is eating our sunflowers?

[WolfTales]

Sunflowers are routinely eaten by ground hogs. It's one of their favorite snacks if not indeed their favorite. If the sunflower is there in the morning and gone in the evening you have a ground hog. Ground hogs come out at dawn and dusk to feed. Beetles, slugs etc. will be seen by the gardener crawling on the sunflower long before they are able to destroy it. But the ground hog will eat the buds off the plant in a blink of an eye and then move onto the next one. Although if you take the time to watch one it really likes to savoy the sunflower like we would with a good wine.
Some folks think live trapping a ground hog is a good idea but it's not. In most states it's illegal. You may also be catching a mom who has left her kits in the den, in which case all of the kits will die of starvation-this is a terrible way for an animal to die-it's painful and can take up to a week for the animal to die. But even taking a male ground hog and relocating it is the same thing as killing it...but much slower and scarier for the animal. They have no idea where they are, they can't find their dens because they don't have one any more, they are easy prey because they haven't any where to hide and the list goes on...In my opinion it's not the humane thing to do unless you are a licensed wildlife expert.

There is ground hog deterrent spray on the market, I find it to work on my ground hog/ground hogs. They ate about 50 of my sunflowers before I found the spray. At first I really hated these animals for eating my flowers and then I read up about them. It's amazing how and what the mother does to care for her kits and how she finds each kit it's own den and keeps coming back to check up on each of them.

So try the spray, or try planting another flower besides the sunflower or do what I'm about to do in a few minutes...plant in a yard where there is a fence that the ground hogs can't get into easily....Hope this helped.

[musa17]

to wolftales:
can you be more specific about the spray you had success with discouraging woodchucks/groundhogs? if posting rules prohibit links and brand names, can you give a more detailed description? for example, i am looking at a product with several essential oils thjat uses gum arabic as a spreader-sticker. does that match the product you had success with?
musa17

[Oochilalal]

It's the squirrels. Nasty pests. Are back from a 2 day family reunion to find my beautiful 9 foot sunflower plant with 50+ blooming flowers completely ruined.......