If life gives you lemons make lemonade. If life gives you squirrels make Brunswick stew. Recipe:
Have you considered investing in about a dozen or so pythons?
Large ones, please. Them squirrels is pretty big.
Ever try talking to them?
“Bad squirrels! Those are MY tomatoes! My tomatoes!”
At this point, the squirrels may only give you a blank stare in response. Empathize with them, but be firm!
“Aw, you’re just hungry little fellows, aren’t you–but those are my tomatoes!”
Good luck!
You don’t want to mess with squirrelly wrath.
Nuke 'em from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
First, you get a neon light transformer and set up two rings of chicken wire fencing, one a few inches inside of the outer fence. Make sure that they aren’t touching each other. Connect each fence to one terminal of the transformer secondary. Now congratulate yourself on assembly of a Tree Rat Zapper™. Works kinda like a bug zapper, but the blue flash is much larger.
Do not attempt. Professional experimenter on a closed garden. No tree rats were harmed in the writing of this post. Not available in stores. Offer void in Wisconsin.
We have a bad squirrel problem. My neighbor has built a squirrel Vegas casino and resort in her yard. Earlier in the summer the squirrels stole all of my tomatoes. Since I started spraying hot pepper water on the tomatoes, the squirrels have left most of them alone.
You will need:
large bottle of “crushed red pepper flakes”: cheap at CVS
Sprayer bottle (available from hardware store)
Strainer/ colander
coffee filters
glass or steel bowls
jar with lid (pint or quart size)
Filtered water or distilled water (no chlorine in the water)
rubber gloves
Put about 1/4 cup of hot pepper flakes in the jar, and fill the jar with water. Cover. Shake it up and leave it sitting overnight, or a few days, or a week.
Put your gloves on.
Pour the peppery liquid through a strainer into a bowl.
Save the the soggy pepper mush to put on the ground around the tomato plants, for extra squirrel pain. Rinse the strainer
Put a coffee filter in the strainer and SLOWLY pour the liquid through. When the filter gets too clogged, throw it out and get a new one. (If you don’t filter out most of the solids, it’ll clog the sprayer.)
Put the strained liquid into the sprayer bottle, and spray the tomatoes with it.
Spray them every week or so, and after it rains.
The squirrels eventually learn that eating my tomatoes = pain, and they go back over to the free corn buffet and tiny Elvis show, heckle some squirrel dancing girls.
Good luck.
Perhaps providing them with an alternative food source would cause them to lose interest in the tomatoes.
[mafiosa voice] I could always send over a couple of possums to sort your squirrels out…you know, like as a favour and all.[/mafiaso voice]
Youse can pay me back wiv’ installments, OK?
It’s illegal in kambuckta’s country for her to export her native species – but you can have a couple o’ million of the bloody furry bastards from NZ for free, if’n you want 'em. 
Are you trying to do me outta a deal here** Icey**? Talk about schmoozing in on a contract I already had going…
I’ll have to send my cuzzins 'round to sort you out girl. 
Hey, any chance t’ get rid of the maraudin’ li’l marsupial overstayers – us Kiwis will take! And your cousins are already over here, lady. That’s what’s eatin’ our trees!
Ha!
I have never had a problem with squirrels. I am a tomato farmer.
I suggest you invest
in some cracked corn next year
for your rodentous visitors
or better yet a wad of feed corn on a metal stake
to enhance your enjoyment
or theirs or both
Oh, I feel your pain. I had a tomato plant. Got one tomato. Named him Nate. I loved Nate. I loved him so much. Soon, Nate got four friends. FOUR!
Nate, being the clan elder, ripened well before his buddies. While they were still small and green, Nate emerged into a big, beautiful red blob. I hesitated to destroy this beauty by plucking him, but what else was there to do?
So I opened my back door, steely in my resolve to give Nate the best damn going-out a home-grown tomato ever saw. Maybe slice him gently on a plate, fry up some corn to go with him . . .
And then I saw it. The single most worst thing an amateur tomatoiste could see.
My damn DOG running towards me, happily, with Nate firmly implanted in her slobbery jaws.
But I digress.
Point is, tho’ Nate was, tragically, gone, I still had his little buddies as hope for a tomatoey tomorrow . . .
. . . until SkipMagic and I arrived home from a brief stint in Atlanta, to find ALL FOUR of Nate’s little buddies - who never even made it into the pink of adolescence - GONE!
Just . . . gone.
I still cry a little when I think of it.
Damn squirrels.