I’m gonna need your help on this one.
There’s been a garden tragedy taking place right under my nose. While I’ve been crafting my tush off, something has been devouring my plants. And when I say devouring, I’m not kidding. And these aren’t bugs, either, unless we have some pretty enormously frightening bugs around here.
Something is chewing several of my plants off right at the base. Literally eating the plants down to nubs. For example, I had a lovely eggplant that looked like this when I planted it:
Lovely, right? And over the past month or two, it had grown into a nice sized plant. Then, the other day, I found this:
Where did my plant go? The saddest thing to me is the way the plant has sent out new leaves on the sides of its stems, in a last ditch effort to survive. It’s all, “And so you’re back / From outer space…” and it’s thinking, “I should’ve changed that stupid lock.” I don’t know if it will survive or, if it does, if it’ll produce eggplants, but I’ll tell ya, it’s not alone.
No, in fact, a cucumber that already had fruit on it– those super super cute little cukes!– was also severed, and the long vine with baby cucumbers attached was left there to taunt me.
My strong, sturdy jalapeno also got decimated.
So, here’s where I appeal to you for help. What on earth is eating my plants? I know we have skunks and raccoons. Could a skunk do this? I’d say rabbits, but I have never seen rabbits around here. What do you all think?
As for solutions, I’m thinking of putting chicken wire around individual plants to save them. Any other ideas?
Hope you catch the culprit soon–that has got to be really frustrating.
Ummm- do you have deer in the area? I know that sounds weird in a urban setting, but you do have hills and such- we have them and the LOVE my roses…there’s a company called Deer Out that has super awesome organic deer and critter keeper outter- we used the Critter Out. It’s non toxic and smells really great. We’ve used it in the front (moles) and in the back (super squirrel set up housekeeping after the cats left) and it’s worked well for us. The site is deerout.com and they ship anywhere. It could also be slugs. I’m not sure that they slug would completely decimate the plant like that, but you never know! We use shallow bowls of beer strategically placed in the garden near the plants. The slugs apparantly are lushes and literally drown their sorrows in the beer and leave my plants alone. I make DH “dispose” of the carcasses because- ewww, gross. Upside, slugs aren’t picky- the love the Budweiser as much as the Fat Tire – cheap drunks!
So sorry for the plant decimation. I feel your pain- it totally bites. 