My garden keeps getting wiped out.

[Cole_Robbie]

There's a lot of the same story across the South Pacific.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambier_Islands

Approximately from the 10th to the 15th centuries, the Gambiers hosted a population of several thousand people and traded with other island groups including the Marquesas, the Society Islands and Pitcairn Islands. However, excessive logging by the islanders resulted in almost complete deforestation on Mangareva, with disastrous results for the islands' environment and economy. The folklore of the islands records a slide into civil war and even cannibalism as trade links with the outside world broke down, and archaeological studies have confirmed this tragic story. Today, the islands can support a population of only a few hundred.

[RobinB]

Holly,

I hope you figure it out! We don't have any of the same problems that you do! I do have extra plants, though not the same ones you bought. I hope that your mesh works! Let me know if I can help!

Do you have some other protection for your maters? If you're putting tomatoes out, the weather forecast has Reno lows Tuesday through the weekend back in the 30s. I'd wait if I were you, unless you have something in place to protect them!

Sorry to hijack the thread. Now, back to mice...

[JLJ_]

Originally Posted by HollyinNNV

Thanks for this comprehensive post. I have a few questions in response:

1. How much can a plant be eaten and still survive? Should I just wait 7-10 days and see if there is new growth? As long as the roots have not been dug up, is there hope?

2. Do mice dig up roots? I had a plant eaten earlier that was literally dug out.

3. Is hardware cloth something I'd find with gardening supplies or is this something special?

4. With the temporary water bottle/jugs-will I need to take them off during the day because my plants will cook? I'm wondering because things are getting eaten during the day too. I'm surprised that mice are that brave!

1) Depends upon what kind of plant, how well established it is, weather, and whether it's protected from continued damage. I believe you said you had one zucchini and three peppers surviving, and from your picture it looked to me as if there might be more than four plants there that could come back -- ones with bare but healthy looking stems and a little leaf or leaf bud remaining are what I was thinking of. I have had young but established tomatoes come back after hail obliterated all of them above ground, but those were Marglobe -- a tough tomato that sayeth among the trumpets "Ha! Ha!" -- not all tomatoes would come back.

2) Mice can dig -- but with digging damage I'd suspect something more like voles -- or perhaps some sort of ground squirrel. Voles, which like to eat most things in gardens, are much different from moles, which eat bugs underground and only damage your garden accidentally. Voles are sometimes called "meadow mice" -- they're a little bigger than house mice, with shorter tails and builds and faces more like hamsters. While house mice are great climbers, voles are more inclined to dig -- not as deeply as moles or gophers (another critter that would like to eat your garden) -- voles dig burrows or pathways usually at or near the surface -- though they will happily use a tunnel network provided by moles, gophers or other serious excavators.

With respect to mousetraps, if you use them, you want to be sure you set them up to avoid catching critters you're not after. I'm thinking of birds, particularly. Sometimes people put vole traps inside some enclosure -- like a piece of pipe or some sort of boxlike cover -- something that voles will enter, but birds usually will stay out of.

3) I see you found some hardware cloth. Most building supply stores or hardware stores or farm stores have it -- usually with fencing or screens. The best buy I got on it in recent years was from amazon -- they sometimes have had it at good prices -- not always -- most often at the end of the growing season. Can be worth checking, though.

I'm not sure, but it looked as if you might have secured your hardware cloth to the cage you were using. If I were doing that sort of arrangement, I'd use some wire to whip stitch the overlapped ends of the piece of hardware cloth that formed my protective column, then set my hardware cloth column over/around the cage, pushing it into the ground to secure it, but leaving it so that I could easily pull it up, leaving the cage in place, to get at whatever plant was inside the cage.

4) When I plant things early that need protection, I plant them inside a 3 liter water bottle with the bottom cut out and the cap removed. If it gets hot enough to be bad for them, I put a milk jug with bottom cut out and cap removed over the water bottle, to provide shade. As heat and/or size of plant increases, I cut off the top part of the water bottle, so it's a clear plastic eight to ten inch high collar sticking out of the ground -- still providing some protection for the plant, but not retaining heat. I sometimes continue to set the bottomless milk jugs over that collar for shade, if it's needed. I usually leave bottles and milk jug tops in place day and night, but if it varies, I'd be more likely to put the jugs on in the daytime (for shade) and take them off at night, than the other way around. YMMV

Eventually the plants no longer need tops, but for many, especially when voles are about, like this year, I leave the water bottle open topped collars in place all season. Corn, tomatoes, beans, peas, broccoli, cauliflower, gladiolus, for example, grow in their collars all season. This year, because there are voles everywhere, greens, carrots and beets will also remain in collars, though most seasons that's a nuisance with them and not necessary. But in a high vole population year, better a nuisance than having most of the carrots and beets vole-munched.

Voles can, of course, dig under the collars, but it does not usually seem to occur to them to do so before I can get a harvest -- and if it does occur to them, it makes their raiding more difficult and less likely to wipe out the whole production of the garden.

Things like zucchini and other squash, cabbage type plants, etc. -- things that spread -- get their collars removed as soon as they are large enough that the collar begins to be restrictive.

What timing would work for you is something you'll have to decide -- depending upon what your weather is there as your plants progress -- protecting them is good, but of course if you cook them right in the garden . . . not so good.

And . . . you still need to watch for evidence to figure out for sure what is munching your garden -- could be rats, voles, ground or other squirrels, rabbit, marmot, skunk, even possibly some kind of bug-critter (to take in diverse groups). Could be birds looking not for food but for nesting material. Could be a cooperative effort by several sorts of visitors. I really wouldn't expect house type mice to do as much damage as you're seeing. Having so many leaves, but not stems, eaten makes me wonder if it isn't bug-critters or some creature taller than a mouse or even a vole.

Hope some of that helps!

[HollyinNNV]

Originally Posted by RobinB

Holly,

I hope you figure it out! We don't have any of the same problems that you do! I do have extra plants, though not the same ones you bought. I hope that your mesh works! Let me know if I can help!

Do you have some other protection for your maters? If you're putting tomatoes out, the weather forecast has Reno lows Tuesday through the weekend back in the 30s. I'd wait if I were you, unless you have something in place to protect them!

Sorry to hijack the thread. Now, back to mice...

Robin,
Thanks for all of your offers to help! Your moral support has been super helpful so far!!!

I only put one tomato out with my new handy dandy cage. It is the "canary in the coal mine" to see if I can keep the nasty pests out. Then it will be another week before the other tomatoes can go out because they still have to be hardened off. I'm glad you reminded me about the weather, though. I've been so focused on the critter problem that i stopped checking. Oh-and I have a college aged daughter in tornado alley and I've been checking her weather and not mine. Ugh.

Anyways, since I only have one tomato and a handy cage, I was thinking I'd just drape an old sheet over it and call it good.
Holly

[HollyinNNV]

Originally Posted by JLJ_

1) Depends upon what kind of plant, how well established it is, weather, and whether it's protected from continued damage. I believe you said you had one zucchini and three peppers surviving, and from your picture it looked to me as if there might be more than four plants there that could come back -- ones with bare but healthy looking stems and a little leaf or leaf bud remaining are what I was thinking of. I have had young but established tomatoes come back after hail obliterated all of them above ground, but those were Marglobe -- a tough tomato that sayeth among the trumpets "Ha! Ha!" -- not all tomatoes would come back.

2) Mice can dig -- but with digging damage I'd suspect something more like voles -- or perhaps some sort of ground squirrel. Voles, which like to eat most things in gardens, are much different from moles, which eat bugs underground and only damage your garden accidentally. Voles are sometimes called "meadow mice" -- they're a little bigger than house mice, with shorter tails and builds and faces more like hamsters. While house mice are great climbers, voles are more inclined to dig -- not as deeply as moles or gophers (another critter that would like to eat your garden) -- voles dig burrows or pathways usually at or near the surface -- though they will happily use a tunnel network provided by moles, gophers or other serious excavators.

With respect to mousetraps, if you use them, you want to be sure you set them up to avoid catching critters you're not after. I'm thinking of birds, particularly. Sometimes people put vole traps inside some enclosure -- like a piece of pipe or some sort of boxlike cover -- something that voles will enter, but birds usually will stay out of.

3) I see you found some hardware cloth. Most building supply stores or hardware stores or farm stores have it -- usually with fencing or screens. The best buy I got on it in recent years was from amazon -- they sometimes have had it at good prices -- not always -- most often at the end of the growing season. Can be worth checking, though.

I'm not sure, but it looked as if you might have secured your hardware cloth to the cage you were using. If I were doing that sort of arrangement, I'd use some wire to whip stitch the overlapped ends of the piece of hardware cloth that formed my protective column, then set my hardware cloth column over/around the cage, pushing it into the ground to secure it, but leaving it so that I could easily pull it up, leaving the cage in place, to get at whatever plant was inside the cage.

4) When I plant things early that need protection, I plant them inside a 3 liter water bottle with the bottom cut out and the cap removed. If it gets hot enough to be bad for them, I put a milk jug with bottom cut out and cap removed over the water bottle, to provide shade. As heat and/or size of plant increases, I cut off the top part of the water bottle, so it's a clear plastic eight to ten inch high collar sticking out of the ground -- still providing some protection for the plant, but not retaining heat. I sometimes continue to set the bottomless milk jugs over that collar for shade, if it's needed. I usually leave bottles and milk jug tops in place day and night, but if it varies, I'd be more likely to put the jugs on in the daytime (for shade) and take them off at night, than the other way around. YMMV

Eventually the plants no longer need tops, but for many, especially when voles are about, like this year, I leave the water bottle open topped collars in place all season. Corn, tomatoes, beans, peas, broccoli, cauliflower, gladiolus, for example, grow in their collars all season. This year, because there are voles everywhere, greens, carrots and beets will also remain in collars, though most seasons that's a nuisance with them and not necessary. But in a high vole population year, better a nuisance than having most of the carrots and beets vole-munched.

Voles can, of course, dig under the collars, but it does not usually seem to occur to them to do so before I can get a harvest -- and if it does occur to them, it makes their raiding more difficult and less likely to wipe out the whole production of the garden.

Things like zucchini and other squash, cabbage type plants, etc. -- things that spread -- get their collars removed as soon as they are large enough that the collar begins to be restrictive.

What timing would work for you is something you'll have to decide -- depending upon what your weather is there as your plants progress -- protecting them is good, but of course if you cook them right in the garden . . . not so good.

And . . . you still need to watch for evidence to figure out for sure what is munching your garden -- could be rats, voles, ground or other squirrels, rabbit, marmot, skunk, even possibly some kind of bug-critter (to take in diverse groups). Could be birds looking not for food but for nesting material. Could be a cooperative effort by several sorts of visitors. I really wouldn't expect house type mice to do as much damage as you're seeing. Having so many leaves, but not stems, eaten makes me wonder if it isn't bug-critters or some creature taller than a mouse or even a vole.

Hope some of that helps!

Well, I did have some plants left the night you and I first posted. The next morning everything was totally gone, down to the ground.

I went to my local garden expert and he said that I live in "prime vole real estate." Apparently when they hit a high in population, there can be 500 for a 1/4 acre patch. The expert's recommendation was a bait station to poison the voles. So, I have that. And then once things are better under control, he said to use plantskydd and said to use a lot of it. Supposedly it is not degraded by rain. This guy also said that an electric fence would be wasted on voles...hope he is right because I took his advice and didn't buy one.

Yes, I did attach the landscape cloth to the cage in a couple places. After I was all finished and putting it in place I realized that this might be a problem eventually. Luckily I only made one contraption, so I won't make that mistake with the rest.

I understand better now what you mean by a collar for the plants. Your second explanation made more sense to me and my non-visual oriented brain. But, now I can see it in my mind.

Thanks for your help. I reread your suggestions several times to make sure I'm not forgetting anything.
Holly

[HollyinNNV]

Update: The bait is disappearing so either mice or voles are in the garden.

For the first time I actually witnessed an intruder leaving the garden and it was......a little squirrel.

My tomato has not been touched

[Bipetual]

I see you have familiarized yourself with hardware cloth! Nice job on your project, I wish you continued success.

[HollyinNNV]

Originally Posted by Bipetual

I see you have familiarized yourself with hardware cloth! Nice job on your project, I wish you continued success.

Thanks! Hope I have lots of good news to report. Thanks for your encouragement,
Holly