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Post by mnhermit on Aug 16, 2019 13:33:47 GMT -5
I was looking forward to a bumper crop of tomatoes this year, but now find that as they approach ripeness something is eating them. For a while i thought it was Maggie the garbage gut GSHP, but now its looking like voles.
Any suggestions on how to control these critters, or possible other culprits?
So far my only solution is to pick green tomatoes and let them ripen in the window sill, but thats not really a satisfactory aanswer.
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Post by brucemacneill on Aug 16, 2019 14:05:33 GMT -5
Get some snakes.
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Post by Marty on Aug 16, 2019 14:31:10 GMT -5
Too late to train a cat. 410 gauge works well. Leave a few tomatoes on the ground, tainted with *cyanide.
* Yea I know that's mean.
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Post by dradtke on Aug 16, 2019 17:03:07 GMT -5
A friend once suggested spraying them with hot sauce. He said it worked on his strawberries.
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Post by epaul on Aug 16, 2019 18:00:59 GMT -5
I had a red squirrel getting after some of my tomatoes one year. He would gnaw a sizable chunk out of a tomato I was just getting ready to pick. Very aggravating. I caught the little bastard in a live trap I had baited with some corn and then I relocated the little bugger to a very, very nice, very, very new housing development south of me that looked like it could really use some wildlife.
But, enough about me.
I have heard of voles eating young tomato plants (chewing through the stems), but I didn't know they liked the fruit as well. If it is voles, it should be a solvable problem as voles can't fly or leap. Prune the lower leaves of your plants leaving a bare stem up to the next batch of ripening fruit. Wrap this bare stem in crinkled aluminum foil, or better yet, with fly paper or that sticky stuff abortionists paint tree trunks with. If you have tomato cages or support poles, treat them as well. The deal is, voles have to climb up something to get at your tomatoes. Make that difficult.
If your tomatoes are lying on the ground in a tangled mess, shame, shame, shame. Next year stake or cage them. Get those tomatoes up in the air and make those voles work for their supper.
(getting rid of the lower leaves as soon as you can is a good idea, vole or no vole. Old leaves are just a pathway for fungal diseases to get at the important leaves up above. Once a plant begins to put on some size, clip up to or even just above the first cluster of ripening fruit. Generally, with tomatoes and oh so many other plants, it is the top third of the leaf structure, the newest leaves, that do the heavy lifting.
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Post by John B on Aug 16, 2019 18:03:02 GMT -5
*arborists
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Post by epaul on Aug 16, 2019 18:08:30 GMT -5
Them too.
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Post by mnhermit on Aug 16, 2019 21:11:47 GMT -5
We're having a bumper year for snakes, unfortunately we're having a bumper year for voles too. |
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Post by brucemacneill on Aug 17, 2019 5:07:18 GMT -5
Wrong kind of snakes I guess.
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