Its July 11, and no, I haven't gotten any tomatoes yet. Notice I didn't say my tomatoes haven't ripened....I just haven't gotten any due to CRITTERS. Ditto for blueberries, though I netted them. Completely covered the strawberries with row covers (netting didn't work) and did get some. Bunnies, squirrels, deer.....I usually net the whole garden, but its a huge pain, I have to buy new, non-biodegradable netting every year, and I'm just tired of it. Trying to think of creative ways to garden 'out of the box'. I know you gardeners are quite smart--show me how you garden in a non-traditional way to evade all the critters. Container garden? Fence? Dynamite? What?
Show me your pest-proof garden
Blood meal...critters hate the smell of it. They will not come near the stuff. Just have to watch my dogs though cause they like to roll in it.
Hi Yotedog!
When I was living in town I had the hardest time keeping the squirrels out of my tomatoes they would take one bite out of each one then off to something else. One year I grew roma tomatoes just for the squirrels and just sat them on a post by the garden and they stayed out of my garden taking my offerings off to eat.
I have turtles where I am now I think eating my melons so I used chicken wire on the ground last year and it seemed to work. One time I went to pick a melon up nice and big looked so delicious and it was just a hollow shell eaten from the bottom!
Just wanted to let you know that my Sparkelberry is like three foot tall now and my Apollo is slowly getting to two foot lol They look like they are happy campers, nice and healthy :)
Good Luck with your garden I hope you get a lot of ideas on here!
LeBug,
I have squirrel problems with tomatoes here too, it seems our local squirrels like anything that's orange or red - lily buds gets chomped too. When I started gardening, my neighbor (the one with the huge maple tree that is also a squirrel condominium) always had one tomato potted up and in a cage, so that they'd be sure to get at least some tomatoes. I started with Roma tomatoes, and that first year apparently they didn't realize they were tomatoes, I had a huge harvest and gave some to my incredulous neighbors. The next year they were prepared however, and I found many one-bite tomatoes thrown around the yard. Last year a friend told me that maybe the squirrels were after the moisture in them, so I started leaving shallow pans of water around about the time the tomatoes started ripening. That seemed to help, very few problems except the week I went out of town and the pans dried out.
My little dog Chloe is always on patrol and keeps the squirrels on the run. A fence should help keep out the bunnies and deer.
