How to Keep Tomatoes from Being Gnawed?

[hardland]

I'm just getting ripe tomatoes and the first few have been chewed by something, Squirrel, Rats? How do I keep them off the tomatoes?

[rainbowgardener]

I would never get to eat any tomatoes if I didn't cage them in. Everything loves tomatoes, the ones you mentioned, plus raccoons, woodchucks, birds, deer, etc. If your tomatoes are in beds, it is cheap and easy to fence the bed with deer netting or plastic fencing. You need to bury the bottom few inches and then pull it together over the top, so that they are in a complete cage.

[imafan26]

Slugs and snails love them too so you need to protect them from them too.

[Juliuskitty]

In my south Fl. Garden, it hasn't been squirrels, it was rats. They would be fine when I went to bed, but holes in them in the morning. I got a live trap at Home Depot, put peanut butter onto the platform because they like it better than tomatoes, and in the morning it caught the rat.
I found out they seem to hunt in pairs because the next day it had another. Then no more for a while.
Then more a few weeks later, so trapped them again.

[MB3]

groundhogs and raccoons got some of mine last year. but I just sort of have to deal with it, since low cost to others is prohibitively expensive to me. If I have a much worse problem this year, I may have to see what I can salvage for free, as that is about my only option.

[rainbowgardener]

If you can't buy anything, then you can't, and I have been there. But if you have a little bit of money, you can get 100 feet of 7' tall deer netting for under $20. And it is re-usable so will last you for a number of seasons. You can use anything you can find in the way of recycled poles to wrap it around.

If you can't do that, I would check freecycle for any kind of fencing stuff people are getting rid of.