Rant

My dad was in a constant battle with wild rabbits!
There's always something!

No wonder you hate that Possum. Grey squirrels stole all the bulbs we planted once. They also took over the bird feeder scaring the birds away from it. Pesky creatures.

Don't know why gardening is good for mental health. All I do is kill things. Worse than that the first thing I do is clear the corpses that I killed yesterday. Meaning slugs and snails.
And clearing up the poo from foxes hedgehogs and cats.

It’s a great shame those pests are are protected, but if it was me……..

It’s slugs n snails here in the north west England. I can’t grow lupine in the borders. I love hostas and grow them in pots with copper tape round them to try and stop the things climbing up. Once one SAS type gets over the tape, it absails or leaps from pot to pot munching the leaves and laying next years invaders.

Grey squirrels are the focus of my ire. In our garden we have a beautiful hazel tree and, now, also a walnut. In 28 years living here we have not consumed a single nut off either tree.

The squirrels get there first and every lovely brown nut I pick off the grass, I turn it over and there is the hole drilled out and the kernel gone.

I HATE grey squirrels.

nanna8 I feel your pain - shared by gardeners the world over. Have you thought of a dartboard with a picture of a possum on it to alleviate the stress?

Here at the southern end of the UK we have urban foxes, big American grey squirrels and more than our fair share of slugs and snails all waiting to pounce after dark.

How utterly sickening for you, nanna8. 💐
I’m reminded of the time I strove to make a little bit of garden when we were living in a Middle Eastern Desert. Some ‘sweet soil’ (just non-salty sand) was delivered and my plantings were finally beginning to take off, when I came home from work one day to find that locusts* had descended in droves and stripped the lot.
*a biblical-type plague at the time. A friend who was a nurse once had young local boys trying to appal her by devouring live locusts almost in her face! To them it was hilarious.

Beasts, the lot of them! We have 2 sorts of possums in our garden- little ringtails which are quite cute and great big brush tails, bigger than our cats. They make a funny noise at night which sounds like a heavy breathing pervert in the garden! They are protected here but in NZealand they kill them and make things from their fur.

It’s slugs and snails for me when you get up and see the slimy trails and then your plants decimated My friend gave me 6 lupin plants and 3 have been completely stripped not a leaf or even bit of a leaf left just 3 completely bare stalks So so disappointing

I feel your pain. I have muntjac deer invading my garden. They've munched their way through some of my favourite plants.
I hate the little b*****s.

sorry they're not endearing themselves to you, OP.

the word possum always reminds me of dame edna everage; i'd never heard the word before.
i just assumed it was a term of endearment.