which critter is responsible??????

[merrymary]

Hello,

My Lettuce has been eat as well as pea plant , cucumber (only leaves nibbled off). However my green bean and tomato plants have been left alone. Any idea what type of critter is doing this? I thought maybe rabbits but why would they leave tomato and beans alone?

[rainbowgardener]

Well if your tomato plants don't have fruits yet, nobody much is going to bother the leaves, which are toxic. Tomatoes are in the deadly nightshade family and the stems and leaves have toxic alkaloids in them. You can blend them up in water (with garlic onions hot peppers and other strong smelling stuff) to make a spray to keep insects off your plants.

I'm not sure about the beans... Could be any of a variety of critters eating your plants. I have groundhogs which tend to eat things from the top down leaving little stem stubs. Post some pictures or tell us more about the pattern of damage and maybe someone can help you more. If you have rabbits around, that's always a good guess.

[Peterjay]

Tomato plants might contain poisonous substances, but a deer or two will mow down a row of tomato plants in the bat of an eye. A local farmer told me a while back that his entire planting of 350 had been either severely damaged or completely destroyed by deer. I put out 4 leggy plants a couple of weeks ago just to get them in the ground - they were munched the first night, and the tracks left no doubt who did the munching. I doubt the poison in tomato plants is potent enough to do much harm to an animal the size of a deer - it certainly doesn't deter them

[rainbowgardener]

Interesting. I don't have deer where I am now (or at least I haven't, my next door neighbor just told me she spotted a deer in our yard the other day, not good news!), but did the last place I gardened. The deer would eat every single tomato, just before it got ripe enough for me. I'd be watching and watching the tomato get bigger and less green and then one morning it would just be gone. But they never touched any of the plants. I guess our deer knew enough not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. I understand that the toxins in the tomato leaves are very low concentration and not harmful to humans or other big animals, though insects don't like it; I just have never seen deer or anything else bother them much.

[Peterjay]

Deer can be perplexing to say the least. I've seen them walk right past all kinds of nice soft greenery and chow down on raspberry canes, thorns and all. I guess they have individual tastes, just like people. They cleaned out all my tomato and pepper plants one year, including a Portuguese variety of pepper that was hot enough to take the hair off your arm. Fruit and all. I couldn't eat them whole like that but the deer did. I suppose when they're as numerous as they are in these parts, it's a matter of grabbing what they can before somebody else gets it. We can't even go out without closing the windows; the deer come up so close to the house that I'm afraid our dogs will go right though the screens trying to get at them. Small wonder that Lyme disease is rampant in this neck of the woods. They sell more doxycycline around here than they do Coca-Cola.