What’s Eating Our Garden? (Besides Us)

 It has been a highly-productive year for the garden. We’ve had pounds of chard, stacks of zucchini, buckets of tomatoes, and more cucumbers than you can shake a stick at. I’m personally up to a 2-cucumber-a-day habit. I fear when we run out, I’ll have to wear some sort of patch to ease myself off of them. While we’ve been eating fresh produce as fast as we can, sharing with friends, freezing and preserving, there’s still a great abundance. That is likely why I am not being particularly strict about all the other species that also happen to be enjoying our produce.

The most blatant offenders have been the squirrels. I don’t think I would mind so much if they just picked one tomato or cucumber and just ate that. But noooo, they have to sample half a dozen vegetables. I hate finding tiny tooth marks on an otherwise perfect zucchini. If it’s not too bad, we trim the chewed off bits, but often it’s too much or we find it too late. I can shrug off one or two ruined pieces of veg, but they’re starting to get out of hand. We’ve finally taken a hard line on the tree rats, but it doesn’t seem to be making that much of a difference yet. 

A squirrel left this half-eaten tomato right on the top of the garden gate!

Here's one of the cagey little jerks. I've found they're rather photo-shy.

The deer have gotten a bit too fresh themselves. I planted some rattlesnake beans along the back of one of the garden beds. I made sure to put the trellis away from the fence a bit, but apparently not far enough. Last year, the yard long beans, planted on the other bed at the back of the garden, were right against the fence. The deer enjoyed them quite thoroughly, but I didn’t really care because I didn’t enjoy the taste or texture of the beans. It seems, however, that I trained the deer to come looking for beans. 

It is fun to see them in the back yard.

Too bad they've been eating my beans!

As this year’s beans grew, the trellis started to lean back against the fence. I didn’t not pull it forward in time, so the deer got a taste. They must have really enjoyed the delicate purple spotted pods because even after I reset the trellis, the deer reached over the fence to continue eating them. They had to step up on some sandbags and stretch to do so. Well, my husband devised a solution with a recycled piece of fence. Let’s see Bambi get to my beans now!

Anti-Bambi technology.

Another unsurprising garden invader has been stem borers. We’ve had problems with those little beasties since we started gardening. I’ve read that the best way to get rid of them is to run a wire into the holes in the stem and skewer the larva. Yeah, no. That makes my stomach turn just thinking about it, so they’ve just had their way with our zucchini plants. In the grand scheme of things I don’t mind too much. While the stems have been just torn apart, we have gotten several dozen zucchini already and the plants are managing to keep going. I imagine we could find some heavy-duty poison to eradicate the problem, but there are too many other insects we actually want in the garden like bees and butterflies.

The stems are a mess...

...but the fridge is full of zucchini!

I have to admit that I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for caterpillars. I blame raising monarchs in elementary school. This year, I gave up a second harvest of dill for a trio of swallowtail caterpillars. My husband and I actually moved them from the dill patch in one part of the garden that they had eaten down to just stems to patch in another bed. I’ve already dried a bunch of dill weed and used some of the seed heads for pickles, so I’m willing to sacrifice for the squishy little guys.

Raawr!

We have monarch caterpillars in our orange milkweed too, so that’s exciting!

One thing that hasn’t been eating our garden is the rabbits. Last year, as some may remember, I neglected the garden to the point that a rabbit raised a litter of babies in our pak choi patch. The perimeter fence has been secured since then, so no one is living in there this year. One bunny did, however, consider having her litter under our clothesline; which would have been a very bad idea. We got to watch her one evening digging a hole and lining it with fur. Fortunately, she seems to have abandoned her efforts. I wonder if she was one of the babies from the garden. She does seem particularly young and dumb.

Her lovely little nest we hope she doesn't use.

The sweet little dumb bunny.