Rats are making their own pizzas now?
Mankind is doomed.
The smartest pest out there for getting into fruits and vegetable gardens is the ornery raccoon.
Good.
They’re actually pretty nasty stuff, made worse by the fact that a lot of people don’t take them seriously.
The problem is the fumes; just making it hard for creatures to eat them isn’t enough.
http://ldh.la.gov/assets/oph/Center-EH/envepi/Pest/Documents/Mothball_Fact_Sheet.pdf
Well damnit! They’re eating the green tomatoes, too. One of the two vines is now completely devoid of any fruit whatsoever, and I know there were some unripe tomatoes on it before. I’m not sure if this means the animal repellent isn’t working, or if they stole them before I put the repellent down and I just didn’t notice before.
Wire cages?
Get hardware cloth or something similar, with really small openings. Bend the bottom out at least several inches along the ground and weight it down well with something you can easily move to open the cage so you can harvest. Put stakes around the tomatoes and wrap them up well.
Impractical on a field scale, but for two plants it ought to be manageable.
If it’s rats you’re dealing with, I doubt repellents are going to work, because rats eat such a wide range of stuff. The repellents are mostly for species such as deer and rabbits, which may be put off by a stink of blood or rotting eggs or meat. And I’m dubious about the capsiacin for rodents, because one year I had some quite hot peppers stored in the attic, and mice ate them all. (I know it was mice, they left evidence.)
I have found that physical barriers are the best way to keep varmints from eating my tomatoes. Mine are in containers on the deck, so I take a dog ex-pen and put it around the plants and then top it with screening material - the kind you use to put in a screen door. When the fruit starts to show up, I wrap the sides of the pen with it too if I notice any nibbles on the tomatoes - I don’t know if it’s rats or really skinny squirrels (the ex-pen bars are only about an inch apart), but this method works pretty well keeping them out.
We find the half-dozen semi-feral cats that the neighbors feed to be very effective. I’ve also heard of planting catnip to achieve the same thing. I planted a couple of catnip seedlings a few weeks ago, so I guess we’ll find out next spring.
Great - so instead of rodents you’ll have cats rolling around in and squashing your plants, not to mention crapping on the tomatoes.
We’ve been here for 3 years and it hasn’t been an issue yet.
This was going to be my suggestion, except that 1/4" holes won’t let bees in.
You might try 1/2" holes, but that might be big enough to let mice in. I don’t think rats or squirrels would be big enough to squeeze through.
You’d actually want to build wooden frames for six sides of a square or rectangular prism and make sure the edges were screwed or nailed together to prevent tresspass. Those frames would be on the inside of the prism, so the wire mesh would deter the critters from just chewing through the wood. Of course you’d want to hinge one face and you’d have to make sure the non-hinged side(s) of that door could be firmly aligned to make sure the critters aren’t squeezing through.
All quite a PITA but, as I’ve seen on some gardening sites, “Grow them and they will come.”
–G!