Critters!

[JayPoc]

I've been growing maters for about 10 years, and despite living "in the country", I've never had major critter issues (bugs yes, birds/mammals no). Anyway, I went out into the garden with my morning coffee, and found that something had disrupted my tomatoes. What was affected were mostly unripe cherry types. While some of the tomatoes appeared to be partially eaten, I couldn't make out any obvious tooth marks, etc. Mostly, it looked like the maters were knocked off the vines and crushed a bit. No other obvious damage was done to the plants themselves, but probably a dozen unripe tomatoes were knocked down and squished up. Anyone seen this sort of damage before? Any ideas as to what it might be?

[Lindsaylew82]

Mere speculation, but I'm thinking deer were sampling.....

The green ones look like they may have been sampled and found to be unsavory, and spit out.

We're lots of them missing or just trampled? Anything else amiss?

[JayPoc]

We have deer, but these plants are in an area that aren't really accessible to them. On the second morning, quite a few were missing. I put up some fencing and am now out of town for a couple of days. We'll see what's going on when I get home.

[applestar]

I'm at a loss to account for the appearance of that first green tomato. It does seem like large animal rather than smaller nibblers doesn't it? Could it have been a dog?

[Lindsaylew82]

With two littles under 5, I'm pretty familiar with the "Chew Two Times And Spit It Out" technique.

I do think it's something larger. Never underestimate the resourcefulness of a motivated groundHOG on stilts...(a deer)

[rainbowgardener]

In the past few days, I've started seeing more and more of my tomatoes on the ground with a bunch of little holes in them. I opened one up to see if something had bored into the inside, but it was perfectly clean and whole inside.

Observation finally showed me the culprit. We just adopted a new rescue dog last Sat. New dog has been pulling tomatoes off and carrying them around -- hence the puncture marks. She is not eating them at all, just using them as toys, occasionally rolling on them! May have to put deer netting up until she gets the idea my tomatoes are not toys!

Here's old dog and new dog:

So some dogs may eat tomatoes, but at least I can bear witness that they like to pull them off the vine and play with them!

[digitS']

Deer will eat the tops off the plants.

They will also take the fruit, crush it, and drop it.

Reading the first few sentences, JayPoc, I was thinking "did you look for deer tracks?" Then, the photos show your mulch. Okay, difficult to see tracks in that.

Deer will also eat potato plants, or have, in one of my gardens. Confuses me that they will eat a toxic foliage but they may not bother to swallow the tomato fruit, itself.

Steve

[JayPoc]

So I may have solved this mystery. This morning, I was sitting at the dining room table and got the "being watched" feeling. Three feet away out the back door, this bugger was giving me the stink eye. Crazy!

[nltaff]

Priceless! We have groundhogs here, and we can't keep them out from under our sheds. Digging machines. We stop up the holes with rocks and logs but they just move them out of the way. I love to watch them run for cover when we drive up to the property or noisily step outside the door. Ditch-diving crazy critters! I've never seen one this curious before. You certainly have a bold one. Looks like he's saying, "I don't particularly like the offerings out here, what've you got in there?"

[applestar]

GroundHOG!

[Java]

Didnt want to start a new topic. As I seem to have similar problem.

Yes Groundhogs. They eat my tomatoes too. As soon as one of my tomatoes started going red, they started going for it. I think, it can smell something is ripe but not which one.

How do I stop it. I live in apartment complex. My setup is simple. Look pic.

Any help will be appreciated.

[rainbowgardener]

Set up some deer netting around it. Probably best is to put the support stakes in the ground outside your container and wrap the deer netting around them.