I don't blame you. I'd be so mad if this was happening to me. Tim says that "theft of agricultural plants" is a higher-grade offense than normal theft, at least in Texas. He doesn't know if that is true here in Oklahoma. I hope you can catch whoever is doing this. Is your yard fenced? Does the gate have a lock? I'd be tempted to replant and put a low electric fence around the plants, with a couple of strands of wire in the hopes that it might get the attention of whoever is taking your plants.

Do you have replacement plants on hand to use to replace them? If you don't, I can bring you a bunch to the spring fling, assuming hail doesn't demolish my garden between now and then, forcing me to use my back-up plants here. I've got probably 100 or more back-up plants available and many more coming along from a very late seed-sowing around the end of March, so let me know if you want me to put your name on a bunch of them. The ones I started from seed at the end of January are huge and throw temper tantrums daily begging to be planted soon. They will take off and grow well and produce quickly once they finally make it into the ground because I've been careful to pot them up and not let them get root-bound, so far at least.

Plant theft is more common than most people think. A couple of years ago the Master Gardeners group in the Sherman-Denison, TX area southeast and across the river from us put in a huge amount of new landscaping at a park that was being re-done, and then someone came along and stole a whole bunch of those new plants. There was quite a bit of news coverage at the time, but I don't think they ever figured out who stole those plants.

I always worry about people stealing from my garden because it sits between our house and the road, since that's where the best soil is. It's never happened yet, as far as I know, but to tell you the truth, a person could come a pick a few dozen tomatoes in summer and I might not even miss those tomatoes in a good year. (I sure would have missed them last year!)

All my friends and neighbors know they are welcome to whatever they want from the garden, and maybe strangers stay away because we have six big dogs.

You do have my sympathy, Ezzirah, and I hope whoever is stealing your plants gets caught. I'd be tempted to buy or borrow a trail camera and set it up to shoot photos of the area where the tomatoes are planted.

Dawn

Sounds like it's time to bring out the Veggie Cams!

Every time I think I've heard it all, something new comes along! Now who would steal tomato plants? Geez, there are some knuckleheads out there!! I am so sorry, Ezzirah! There's just too much "mean" in the world today and 19 plants? I'd put out bear traps!

Susan

Over the weekend we planted 6 Nellie Stevens hollies. THey are small, ( that's how I could afford 6 LOL) We planted them quite a ways from the house since we are trying for an evergreen screen from the county road. I went to give them a drink today and 3 of them looked like they had been yanked up and cast aside. They were still there, and didn't look harmed. The same thing happened last year to my eggplants. I set them out, and a day or so later They had been yanked up and set aside. I replanted the hollies, watered them, and gave them a dusting of cayenne pepper. If I see coons sneezing on the trail cam tonite, I will know the reason.
mo

Maybe you could get a wildlife camera mounted - they are motion detected and work in the night. I hope you catch whoever/whatever did it. I can't stand thieves... We work hard for what we have.

thank you every one for your kind replies,

I walked out of the house yesterday morning and there was two fist sized holes where some cabbage plants have been.

Do you think it could be voles? How would I know if it was?

I am just upset at this point, I busted my behind on those plants!

And electric fence sounds good right about now! LOL.....

How big were the cabbage plants? Knowing that will help us answer the vole question.

And, by chance, are you in extreme northeastern OK where some people have trouble with groundhogs?

We have a lot of voles on our acreage, but they rarely penetrate the garden fence and, if they do, the cats get them so I very rarely see vole damage. Check the ground around the area where the plants used to be. If it is voles, as they nibble, they often leave gnawing marks even on plants that survived their dining. Check too for tunnels in the ground near your plants which might indicate moles or gophers. Gophers are a huge problem in my county.

If I was having plants disappearing at the rate that you are, I'd sprinkle something white on the ground just before dark. You could use lime if you have it, or all-purpose flour. Sprinkle it thickly enough around your plants that a rabbit, squirrel, fox, raccoon, etc. would leave footprints in it. Check it the next morning for animal tracks. If there are no tracks and the plants are missing, it could be field mice too small to leave tracks or it could be birds. Or humans with a flashlight who avoided stepping in the white powder.

You may think you don't have any of those animals, but you'd be amazed at the animal tracks I have seen since moving here. We all think our property is quiet at night, but many animals are out, about and on the move all night long, even in urban areas. My brother lives in a neighborhood built in the 1970s, but a river runs through it less than a half-mile away, and he has found a fox in his mailbox before (we don't know why it was there!) and possums. When we lived in an even older neighborhood built in the 1940s and a couple of miles from a lake, we had possums a lot. I think that wildlife adapts and manage to coexist with humans even in developed neighborhoods, and they are just really smart about not letting themselves be seen.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: All About Voles

This sounds like gophers to me but in you first post, you said you did not have gopher problems so I did not say anything. But I have lost many plants (and some were quite large) by gophers pulling the entire plant underground. If it is gophers and if you follow the tunnel deep enough, you will find your plant.

David

Ez I hope it is an animal. A few years back a member of the Winter Sowing forum kept having plants disappear. He set up an elaborate scheme to find out who or what. The police were eventually able to confirm it was someone in the neighborhood selling the plants for drug money. Sigh.

I have been in my garden and watch a plant sink. Sometimes a gopher will just eat the roots and kill the plant, sometimes they want it all.

Larry

Well, so far since I first posted there has been no more plants missing or damaged. I went out and really looked around the hole that was left by the missing cabbage and there is no tunnels, the ground around them is not disturbed in any way. I am back toward leaning toward human, I mean, the plants that seem to go missing is the ones I just set out. How would an animal know that? I am serious, new tomato plants go out and the next day they would be missing.

If it wasn't going to storm this weekend and I didn't think it would just get washed away, I would put down sand or flour just to look for tracks. *sigh*

I went to the garden this morning and a 2' high tomato plant was missing. So out with the gopher traps.

Ezzirah011,
If you have a piece of rebar or something long and sharp about 2' long, you may pierce the ground around the missing plants looking for tunnels. I have had the gophers backfill the tunnels where they have stolen plants and I have found the tunnels by this method.

David

Ezzirah011,

Please give us an update? Any additional lost plants? Did you catch the thief?

Thanks,
David

Sorry I have not gotten back to this thread, Life got in the way....

More plants are gone now. All my basil, my sage had all the leaves picked off it. (they left one leaf!) half my radishes, another tomato. I am just beside myself. My hubby and I decided to put in a privacy fence, but I just cannot plant anything else to only see it go missing. The basil and sage were up in two separate raised beds (one in each bed) The oregano beside it was not touched. But the sage just looks like someone cut all the leaves off it but one!

The cops have done nothing, I really didn't expect them to, to be honest. But I am heart broken. I really wanted this garden season go well since last year was so bad.

GRRRRRRR.....

Oh, Ezzirah, I am so sorry to hear that this is continuing to happen. If it were me, I'd be just about as mad as I could be, and it takes a lot to make me mad.

I'd like to suggest that it is time you start playing hardball and do everything within reason to catch whoever is doing this to you.

The easiest way is to put up a game or trail camera. You need the kind triggered by motion. Put it where it is aimed at the plants. The motion of the culprit will trigger the camera and it will snap the photo. A game or trail camera is less expensive than a bank of security cameras attached to a home security system. If you have hunters in your family or among your circle of friends, you might be able to borrow a trail camera. (Hopefully the thief won't steal the camera.) At least if you had a photo of the culprit, the cops would have something to go on in terms of clues.

I'd be tempted to make a big, loud show of planting a few replacement plants. Then I'd sit inside at night watching the back yard through a window. If you see the person and recognize them, then you'd have to decide whether to confront them (never alone, and only if you are sure they are not armed with a lethal weapon) or call the cops or what. You approach would have to vary depending on what seemed like the right thing to do at the time. It would be interesting, even if you didn't recognize them as a neighbor, if you could tell if they are walking to your place or driving there.

Alternately, I'd buy a big cannister of red cayenne pepper cheap at Sam's and replant, and then heavily, heavily, heavily shake cayenne pepper powder all over those plants. That'd be an unpleasant surprise for whoever was plucking leaves from the plants or stealing entire plants (unless, of course, they are wearing gloves). You and your family and your pets would have to avoid those freshly peppered plants too.

It is not too late to start over, but you have to figure out who is taking your plants first or you might just keep supplying them with new plants endlessly throughout the growing season. Once you figure it out, then you can figure out what to do about it. Don't be surprised if it is someone who lives right there on your block. If there's one thing I've learned from being married to a cop for a long time now is that some people will steal anything nowadays and the folks who are like that will steal from the own neighbors, friends and families. Maybe you think that no one you know would do that. You might be surprised.

Once your privacy fence is up, the gates must be secured with locks that unlock with a key. Even then, the culprit may just jump the fence or climb over it. Privacy fences do not deter thieves. Privacy fences sometimes make it worse because if you have the kind of neighbors who keep an eye on your place and would call the police if they see someone breaking in, the privacy fence may block their view. Thieves in our neighborhood have backed right up to privacy fences, removed a panel, backed up the vehicle into the yard through the missing panel, and loaded up the vehicle with loot from the fence. No one driving by noticed and reported it. I am not saying a privacy fence isn't good, but just that it is not a cure-all either.

I am baffled at the boldness of this person that he or she just keeps coming back to the same yard over and over and over. Someone doing that feels like they aren't going to get caught. That makes me think they're either driving there, stopping, hopping out of the car and stealing quickly, or they're a neighbor who thinks that no one will report seeing them there since they belong in the neighborhood, if not in the yard. That has to mean that watch y'all coming and going and know when you're home and when you're gone at the very least. That fact alone just makes my skin crawl. It feels creepy.

We have a security light near our garage that comes on at night and flashes when someone crosses the...well...whatever it is that makes it flash. The flashes wake up the dogs and the dogs wake me up. We've never been burglarized, but we've run off some would-be-burglars. You have to do things that make them believe they will be caught.

Our big dogs have kept us from being burglarized before. We know this for a fact because one of our dogs scared off a would-be burglar who told someone else (who then told us) "Man, you cannot go up near that house. That dog they have will kill you. He means business". I don't know what was more appalling---that the person was going to attempt to steal from us to begin with, or that he was stupid enough to tell someone else about it, or that the third person would then relate the story to me. At least then, though, I had an idea of at least one local resident who was never going to be welcome on our property!

EZZ, I would vote on the game camera also. We have trouble here with dog getting into the trash. My son set up a game camera to ID the dogs. One thing I will mention is that his camera does not have much range with the flash and the other setting (UV) I thing does not give a great image at night, but it was good enough to ID the dogs doing the damage.

My wife and I adopted two children about 28 years ago. These two children had special needs. The boy was ADHD and would get up and play all night with his toys and want to sleep at school. I took the sensor out of a motion sensing light and mounted in his bedroom and wired it to a vacuum cleaner motor in the attic. I attached a piece of duct tape to the motor shaft so it would make a howling noise when he got out of bed. (I have a hearing disorder and many things I cant hear). Anyway, that helped me train him to stay in bed at night. You might rig up something you have on hand to tell you when something is moving in your back yard.

Larry

Ezzirah,

I mentioned to Tim this evening that your plants were being stolen and he recommend you post several visible No Trespassing signs around your property. Then, if you catch the person on the property, they can be arrested for trespassing even if there is no "proof" that they have been stealing your plants. He said if the property isn't posted, it is very unlikely an arrest would be made or a case pursued.

Dawn

Ezzirah011,
Any success in catching the thief? I am so sorry that this is happening to you. I hurt everytime that a gopher or cutworm takes a plant or two. So I cannot imagine your pain of loosing this many plants. Please keep us posted.

Thanks,
David

Ezzirah, I got a Harbor Freight flyer the other day that mentioned a driveway alarm for $13 with coupon. I see even online it's only $18, so that is definitely cheaper than continuing to replace all your plants! I think you set it up across the driveway and if someone breaks the laser beam's path, the alarm alerts you. You could likely rig this to make this work in the garden and catch whoever/whatever red handed! (Not suggesting you confront the person, because that could be dangerous, but you could finally KNOW and call the cops).

Here is a link that might be useful: HF link