Zach, deer have gone through my garden before and shown similar disdain for the gardener.

That year, I had built a very substantial tomato trellis with boards. This was back in the days before the number of plants had really gotten to, shall we say, "substantial" levels.

So, I had about 10 plants nearly to a time when they would have ripe fruit. The deer cropped all the taller foliage and pulled off about one-half the green fruit!

Much of the fruit was just dropped. And, these were tomato plants! I had thought that the foliage is, at least, somewhat toxic. Of course, I should have known better than that since they had previously shown up to eat potato plants.

Guard your garden!

Steve

All I can offer is sympathy. If it was an animal, at least there was no maliciousness involved. If it was human, may he or she at least experience the appropriate karma!!!

No, it was an animal. Unless my neighbors are sneaking into the back yard and ripping up my plants, which is doubtful.

From what I can see the culprit also was trying to get into the chicken coop. The tracks are not very distinguishable but it was either a fox or a raccoon. They look more like a fox, but a coon is more likely to also go after the plants. so I'll pull surveillance to see what it is. If it was after the chickens, it will be back soon.

Malicious or not, it's got to go, and I don't putz around with traps and deterrents that may or may not work, I just dispatch them quick and easy and feed them to coyotes, they gotta eat, too ;).

Look for tracks - deer are a prime suspect, but I've had raccoons, skunks, and dogs dig up plants.

Edited - got called away and didn't see your last post.

One year, I had skunk go along and dig up a row of tomato plants, looking for grubs or something. I've had raccoons dig up dozens of daffodil bulbs I'd planted the day before, and the classic, we planted 150 seedling pine trees and the deer came along and, while nibbling off the top, pulled up most of them.

This post was edited by david52 on Thu, May 29, 14 at 13:12

Have you been using fish fertilizer? I've had raccoons make quite a mess digging to find the fish!

This wasn't digging, this was like something grabbed it and pulled it, very bizarre behavior. I think after finding that chicken coop was locked up tight, it got angry and just felt like being destructive.