Thanks to Daphne for hosting
Harvest Mondays. This week the harvest was good. It's always nice to walk into the garden and come back with some veggies. I'm struggling somewhat with something that has been eating eggplants and tomatoes, even to the extent of climbing onto the plants and eating veggies that are atleast a foot off the ground. I spent time reading online to find some clue and figured out that it must be either mice or field rats, since they have similar diets as humans. Voles/moles do not eat veggies. I had wrongly assumed that it was voles/holes eating up my eggplants, but I was so wrong. I have come up with an idea to outsmart(I hope?) these mice/rat and will post a blog later on in the week. Here are my harvests for the week.
Yellow Squash and two (bird pecked and why is it rotting?) plums
Green beans and two red chillies
Cucumbers, red bell, zucchini and TWO tomatoes!!
Carrots, 2 radishes, zucchini, eggplant, cucumbers, green beans, red chillies, 1 tomato
Eggplants, cukes, zucchini, green bell, and lots of green chillies
Red bell, 2 Roma tomatoes(mice/rat eaten), green beans
Sweet banana peppers, red chillies, cucumbers
In other news, Tiny Gardener has a
birthday giveaway on her blog, so if you'd like to be entered into a drawing for a year long subscription of Hobby Farm magazine, head on over to her site to check it out.
Nice harvest. Sorry to see the eaten tomatoes and eggplants
ReplyDeleteYes, well, I don't mind sharing a little bit, but if I'm losing almost half of it, then I have to do something :)
ReplyDeleteAha! Maybe that's what ate my tomatoes too...I have the little bites out of them. Hope you can outwit the little stinkers!
ReplyDeleteGreat harvest even if you do have to share some. Are you saving and sharing seeds? I'd love to try out growing sweet banana peppers.
ReplyDeleteNot a bad harvest for having to deal with pests! Hopefully you can find out a way to get rid of them so you can start raking in more tomatoes.
ReplyDeleteHanni - Sorry to hear about your pests! They sure are nuisance!
ReplyDeleteNartaya - So far, I haven't saved seeds, but that is an idea! Sure, I could send you seeds either from saved or my seed packets.
Prairie Cat - I think their first choice is eggplants, but if that is in short supply, they will raid the tomatoes as well!
Sorry about the 'maters but everything else looks wonderful!
ReplyDeleteTo answer your question from my blog [I never know if people come back to look for a response! lol], we have 110 trees in our orchard. We do have to spray but we do as minimally as possible. We tried one year not too and it was awful. What did produce was the size of a quarter and totally bug infested. :/
If you have squirrels or other ground animals, it's most likely them. i dealt with a ton of ground squirrels this year. If it has been dry, they're most likely seeking sources of food and water.
ReplyDeleteBut, as Mike McGrath says, squirrels are evil creatures sent to make our lives miserable.
i hope that you can battle through them. Maybe a roll of chicken wire? :-/
Allison - Gosh, that's a lot of trees. No wonder you have a farm stand :) Here, I thought you were a home gardener with a small harvest :)
ReplyDeleteBen - I have never seen squirrels in our area, so far. But there is something tiny like a rat/mice, that runs about and we thought they were moles/voles. But after the veggies were eaten, it seems to me they were field rats. I do have a fence around, but they are tiny and can through the fence(:
Beautiful harvests. At my last house it was chipmunks that used to eat my tomatoes. If I didn't net them at the bottom of the cages they would eat everyone of them. Or at least take bites out of everyone of them. They never bothered to finish any.
ReplyDeleteDaphne - Did you see chipmunks during daytime? I haven't seen any around here, so my guess was it was mice/rats doing the damage. They never finish any either! But the damage is enough that it is not usable anymore (:
ReplyDelete