Our vegetable garden is a wipeout this year as some thing is eating everything! First our broccoli plants were snapped off and the tops had vanished, then our carrots mysteriously disappeared; the tops were shorn and lying on the ground but the carrots were gone. Our green beans were late as the first batch rotted in the ground but our second batch was just about ready to flower when, overnight, the vines were all stripped bare. The most bizarre thing - never seen anything like it. They were growing on a cage arrangement made of gardening stakes - quite rickety so if it's a critter it would have to be small and light. Our cucumber plants started out well and yielded 2 beautiful cukes but then ever after we see cukes starting and within days, still tiny, they disappear. OUr zucchini suffers much the same fate although sometimes the fruit is still attached but has bites missing. We've been here for seven gardening seasons and have never had this problem. Ideas? Solutions? Help! Oh and by the way the latest victims were our gladioli - about to flower, snapped off and disappeared!
rats or raccoons. Go to home depot and buy a few rolls of metal netting, (chicken wire) with as small as holes as possible, then you can tie/shape them into box shapes using twisty ties. Other than that, not much you can do. Rat poison wont kill rats as quickly as you need it done.
My heart goes out to you - it is so upsetting to put so much work into something and then see it demolished overnight! In our garden we must first fight off the deer with high fencing. They might be responsible for browsing the bean leaves. Then come the raccoons cleaning all the peaches off a new little tree in one night. We have put a metal cone around the trunk of the other one to try to discourage them. The rabbits ring the fruit trees in the winter, crop the blueberry bushes to the ground and eat the newly seeded lettuce and other crunchy treats and dig burrows into the roots of the logan berry. Our dog is useless, so I will be trying to fence the yard this fall from them. And finally the birds and rats. I have had to use hardware cloth (wire mesh) and build a box for strawberries, raise my pots of brassica starts off the ground, use milk jug barriers to protect young bean plants, cukes, squash etc. I also made a "rat box" to improve our catch rate. Basically a wooden shoe box with the traditional trap mounted in it and only one opening to force the rat to enter the trap from one direction. I have a hinged top for ease of handling. Peanut butter is our best bait and for the first two nights, I only bait the trap, setting the trap on the third. Pretty effective but you must keep on the trap line to make a difference. YUCK! Might be worth spending a night in the garden to see who is the doing the most damage! Good luck!
