A week or two ago I posted in MPSIMS (wrong forum, I know) asking about growing tomatoes. (As we’ve just moved into a house, this season is my first time trying to grow any veggies.) Thanks so much to all who gave me such great advice.
Now I have a new quandary. I just went out there to do my weekly watering, and ALL the tomatoes are gone. I mean, I planted late, so there weren’t that many … maybe 8 or 9 on two plants … but they weren’t anywhere NEAR ripe, and now they’re completely gone. I have heard of birds pecking at tomatoes when thirsty, but that would leave mangled tomatoes, wouldn’t it?
Any ideas on what could have happened? I’m so disappointed because I’m afraid that this late in the season I won’t get any tomatoes this year.
NOTE: The bell peppers seem to be doing fine, though they’re still quite small.
I was going to tell you that a lot of my tomatoes got eaten last year by various animals, but it did leave some trace…
Your tomatoes are completly gone?! That is pretty odd.
I am worried somebody, and not something, did that…
Well, only little kids would’ve done it, I think, because they were still small enough that they wouldn’t be any good for a person to eat. And the kids next door are 2 and 4 and NEVER outside without their parents.
I do live in an area with deer and rabbits. I was thinking maybe a raccoon … ?
I really think mine were eating by racoon and/or skunks. They are big enough to make to damage they made last year ( I gave up on the garden this year!). But I could see some half eaten on the ground, and a general mess. It is odd you have to trace of anything, but maybe they took them and ate them further so didn’t leave anything right there. More than possible.
If I was a racoon, I’d wait until they’re more ripe!
We have raccoons but they don’t eat my tomatos. Some bugs do. If it was a human they would have to look for all of the tomatos & that wouldn’t be practical but animals & bugs can do it pretty easily.
Slugs will leave holes, but they won’t take the whole thing. I would have thought rabbits would wait till they start to ripen.
A year ago, we had hundreds of tomatoes (mostly cherry, but also some small yellow plums) and our next door neighbor’s all got eaten. By what, I don’t know. I have seen a skunk on occasion, loads of squirells, and an animal I couldn’t identify, but may have been a hedgehog (my wife’s guess). At any rate, the difference between my yard and the next door yard is that I sprinkled blood meal all over and apparently the varmits don’t like it. One year, I used red pepper flakes and they don’t like that either.
I have never seen a bird attack a tomato. I can’t swear it doesn’t happen but I have never seen it.
I have personally observed both squirrels and rats knock of whole tomatoes (both ripe and unripe) and head on down the road to a salsa party (or in the case of the green ones to make fried green tomatos). I’ve also seen Mockingbirds and Cardinals peck away at the riper tomatoes.
When it happened to me last year it turned out to be a groundhog. A really fat groundhog. It ate about ten pounds worth of green tomatoes, stripped every plant I had but left the plants undamaged. Not a bit of litter on the ground either. I was confused at first until I caught the critter in the act of despoiling the rest of my garden. I put up a small fence around my plot this year and so far it seems to be keeping the wildlife out.
One more vote here for “neighborhood kids”. Is there a fence around your garden? Is it in the back of your yard by the alley?
I once saw a little girl clamber over my back chain link fence in order to pick a handful of peonies for herself and her sister, who stood waiting patiently in the alley. When I shouted, “Hey!” in surprise, they took off running in terror, and I felt bad, because if they’d asked, I’d have given them as many as they wanted.
Thanks for all your ideas, everyone. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t kids, though of course kids would do something like that. (My back yard doesn’t face an alley; it faces one house–no kids there–with quite a bit of acreage. The house next door has a two-year-old and a four-year-old, but they are NEVER outside without their parents.)
Dwyr–or anyone else in the know–do groundhogs leave piles of dirt? My garden is at the edge of our property, and close to it, on our neighbor’s property, there is a very large tree. I walked around the tree Saturday to try to ascertain what had happened to the tomatoes (I thought I might find remains), and I saw three lumps of dirt behind the tree. I didn’t see any noticeable holes, but then again, I didn’t look for any either. I would not have thought that groundhogs had the dexterity to remove tomatoes without damaging the plants; that’s one reason I figured it might be racoons.
BTW, Seven, I have known dogs to do this, so if we had a dog (or if our neighbors had any that ran loose), that would have been my first thought.
I’m not sure if they do skeptic_ev, the one that raids my garden comes over from an empty lot behind my fenced in yard. It pushes under the fence in a corner where there’s a bit of dip in the ground.
Do gophers pick fruit? (I mean the pocket gophers, the 8-inch-long kind.) They leave mounds of crumbly dirt, a few inches high and a foot or two across, and often no visible holes. If holes are seen, they are about 2" in diameter.
mounds of crumbly dirt, a few inches high and a foot or two across, and often no visible holes. If holes are seen, they are about 2" in diameter.
Yes, MaryEFoo, that’s what the mounds of dirt behind the tree look like. But I think gophers tend to eat roots of plants they encounter underground. (They couldn’t get to my garden that way very well, as it is a raised bed enclosed by timbers.) I may never know what did it, I suppose, though that would certainly help me protect the (bigger) garden I intend to have next year.
I wonder if I should worry for the safety of my bell peppers …
