Mike, you're right to look for a "good" place for catnip! It can be invasive. I've been pulling it up for 3 years since our cat passed, and it's still coming up.

When I tried a leash with the Siamese cat that I had years ago, her response was to sit down and not move.

I was hoping that we would get to taste the serviceberries this year. There were lovely red ones. They ripen when they turn purple. Yesterday and today, there were chipmunks climbing up the trunk and onto the branches. They cleaned out the red berries. Apparently, they do not mind if the berries are not completely ripe. The same thing happened last year with the cranberries my husband has in a pot.

Our chipmunks are getting more intrusive. They ate some of the beans off the plants in the garden. We have it fenced, but chipmunks are great climbers. They just climb around the chicken wire that keeps out the rabbits, and then they eat what is only just starting to develop on the plants.

Other than their eating the unripe cranberries off of my husband's bog pot or the squash seed we were germinating last year (these are now in cages until they get past that stage), we have not had wholesale garden pilfering before.

Any suggestions? We love getting crops of beans.

BA, you might consider setting a trap. There's a guy on YouTube, Shawn Woods, who tests mouse and rat traps (he has thousands) but I think some of them can be applied to chipmunks as well. I'm thinking about a trap called the Dizzy Dunker. It can be used as a kill or a live catch trap. You need to supple your own bucket. It consists of a ramp (so the critter can climb up) and a dunking device that fits on top of the bucket. You bait the wheel of the dunker, the critter climbs up and steps on the wheel to get the bait and then gets dunked to the bottom of the bucket. You can have water in the bucket for a kill trap or no water for a live catch trap.

You can get the device on Amazon, he has a link to it on his channel.

I won't be trapping them.

I'm not sure why we have so many, but we have one of the few mostly natural areas left along our road, and with so many people taking out trees to build their "dream homes" (in which they will spend just a few weeks in the summer), we may be having more move into our yard. They never bothered the garden before.

Mike, I do have lots of daffodils (but very few tulips) since the deer and small critters don't eat daffodils or their bulbs. Cayenne pepper has not deterred them from the bird seed in winter or other small seedlings in summer. Last summer a (or several?) chipmunk picked most all of my cherry tomatoes on the deck. It then peeled the tomato, left the peels in another pot, sat there and ate the tomato, not 5 feet away from where I was sitting. Now, my husband has made a wire cage, with 1/2" holes, to go over the cherry tomato pot and plant; he is still figuring out the top for it so I can easily remove it to reach down inside to pick the tomatoes. I will try to find my photo of the pot full of peels and post it later. No critters seem to bother the salad or paste tomatoes I have put in the in-ground garden in the back yard. I'm able to plant them outside the electric fence, as a sort of "first line of defense" against raiding varmints.

I took this photo last summer. I have not seen Chippy yet this summer, but I'm betting it will be back once the cherry tomatoes on the deck are ripe.