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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Depending on which hemisphere of the Earth you're currently reading this from, summer is finally starting to fight its way to the surface. For the more "green" of our readers, that can mean it's time to start making plans for summer gardening. But as anyone who's ever planted something edible can tell you, garden pests such as squirrels are fantastically effective at turning all your hard work into a wasteland. Finding ways to keep them away from your crops can be a full-time job, but luckily it's a job nobody will mind if automation steals from humans.
[Peter Quinn] writes in to tell us about the elaborate lengths he is going to keep bushy-tailed marauders away from his tomatoes this year. Long term he plans on setting up a non-lethal sentry gun to scare them away, but before he can get to that point he needs to perfect the science of automatically targeting his prey. At the same time, he wants to train the system well enough that it won't fire on humans or other animals such as cats and birds which might visit his garden.
Source: https://hackaday.com/2018/04/30/training-the-squirrel-terminator/
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 02 2018, @02:43PM (1 child)
We have a couple of bamboo stands around the house, one grows strongly enough that it has made itself into a nice big bushy patch. The other can't get ahead of the squirrels - they eat the shoots just as fast as they come up. Funny thing, the strongly growing patch is an "edible" variety of bamboo that you can harvest for salads, while the others that the squirrels are decimating are a similar species but too bitter for human consumption even when they are new shoots.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday May 02 2018, @05:54PM
Yeah, they don't usually bother my food crops.
I did these white decorative pumpkins a couple years back, though, and they went crazy on them.
It looked like a fricken albino massacre out there!