Animals vandalized my garden last night! I say vandalized because I don't even think they ate anything. They just showed up, broke stuff, dug stuff up, had themselves one of those rave parties the kids are into, and then left!
A clearer look at the footprints they left behind as a giant F.U. to me. Definitely looks like raccoon tracks.
More seedling damage, this time the Parris Island cos I had in the ground. Pumpkin Kanye saw the whole thing go down, but I can't get him to talk. I'm thinking he might have been in on the job.
They even dug up the oregano! I didn't know that raccoons were so into herbs.
My dogs didn't bark once last night. Maybe they weren't teenage raccoon ravers after all, they were actually raccoon ninjas.
-J
This sucks - rumor and experience have it that there is very little you can do to prevent these nocturnal attacks. I have heard about some electronic fence type units, but one of the points of having a garden is that you get fresh veggies and herbs and stuff for very little money. Now, if you have to invest in high tech animal repulse systems, what's the point? Or, on the other hand, a one-time investment might mean happy gardening for years to come. We think a local rat ate all our heirloom tomatoes (and the plants themselves without any tomatoes on them) last summer. I am resolved never to even try to grow them again and go through the heartache of seeing that destruction. A rodent beat me down. Please post what you find about ways to stop these critters. Maybe I will find the courage to grow again..... Jim
ReplyDeleteHi Jim,
ReplyDeleteThat's tragic! I also saw some rat as well as squirrel damage this past summer on my tomatoes, but it wasn't a total rodent robbery like yours was. For me the solution was finding and removing nearby rodent habitat. I discovered this the hard way when one night a rat fell out of a Mexican Fan palm near my garden plot and damn near landed on my head. I had been lax about getting the dead leaves trimmed and they had created enough cover for rats and squirrels to make nests. After I had someone come and trim the tree, there was much less rodent activity. Perhaps that might help you? I know rats also love to nest in ivy, so that would also be a plant to keep away from a garden plot.
As a follow up to the racoons, I think they were probably looking for slugs and maybe also grubs. I had been seeing quite a bit of slug damage but had been (once again) lax about dealing with the situation. I found both slugs and grubs that the raccoons had missed near the destruction sites. I'm going to throw out some Sluggo non-toxic snail bait and see if keeping down the slug population helps my yard seem less appealing to the raccoons.
It is really sad to have to give up on growing a vegetable. I swore never to grow corn again because I couldn't deal with the horrible disgusting-ness of finding corn earworms in all the corn. Yuuuck.
Thank you for sharing, and I really hope you're able to find a solution that works for you so you can try growing tomatoes again!
-J
Jen - and Erin -
ReplyDeleteBig alert on the racoon/critter invasion front. We adopted a puppy last weekend, and while I was waitiing in line to get the paperwork finalized for her, I saw a display at the Westside Animal Shelter for an "innovative" green alternative to dealing with pesky animals in the garden. It is called ScareCrow and it is marketed/manufactured by an outfit called Contech. Here is the website: http://www.contech-inc.com/
Check it out and spread the word!
Hi Jim,
ReplyDeleteThat's great you adopted a puppy! Congratulations!
I checked out the website and realized that one of my neighbors has a ScareCrow, or something very similar. He was using it in his front yard. I suspect he was using it to keep dogs and cats off of a newly planted lawn. But he wasn't very forgiving about positioning it, so that even if you were still on the sidewalk but near his lawn, it would send out a shot of water at you. I can definitely confirm, it startled the hell out of me when I was walking by with my dogs. I bet it would work really well on a raccoon! Thanks!