Why do the Squirrels hate me?

At our "city" house, there are a ton of squirrels. Everyone around us has bird feeders, which turn into squirrel feeders. We have Grey, Black, Fox and Red all running around getting into things. They can cause quite the mess.

This year, along with planting things at the Estate, I planted some containers here at the house. I also planted potatoes along the side of my garage where I made a small raised bed. In the containers, I planted some beans and some sweet corn. The beans had come up so well that I decided to plant some more in some extra containers I had. Since it was still early enough in the growing season, I planted some sweet corn for late season harvest. In the last couple weeks, everything started to come up as it should. The corn was looking really good and the beans were taking off. My daughter loves fresh green beans, so I knew it would make her happy to have them pretty much all summer. The corn was more of an experiment. Looking at the expected maturity time and how much time we had left in the growing season, I wanted to see if I could squeeze in a late crop of sweet corn. Well, that was all good until this morning.

I keep the containers on the front porch. They get lots of sun and we water them every day along with my wife's hanging baskets of flowers. This morning, I look out and see that something had clipped off 6-7 of my corn spouts. They were about 4 inches tall and now a bunch of them were laying in the pot. I went to check and saw that not only were they cut off, but something had bitten off pieces of the stems and left them in the dirt. I look at the beans and one of the 9 plants that had sprouted had the same thing happen. Just then, I turn around and see a black squirrel running from the other end of the porch out to the tree in the front yard. That little critter and done all this damage. I've had them pull out flowers from pots on the porch, but they have mostly left my other plants alone. It seems, that is no longer the case.

This is why I don't feel bad when I make a squirrel into tacos or BBQ. With the local ordinances, I won't be able to handle the immediate squirrel problem, but I will be adding a cage to my beans and corn plants that remain. All I can hope for at the "city" house is that the local Eagles and Hawks can help me out.