It’s TomatoGate all over again. I wake up early every morning to walk the dogs and the first thing I do is go check on my tomato plant in my backyard garden. There is nothing I like better than a garden grown tomato. They put any other tomato to shame. They are so sweet and they taste like sunshine. I’ve been dreaming about them ever since I planted them back in April.

Well…

The day before yesterday there were three giant green beefsteak tomatoes just waiting for the sun to finish ripening them. I have been watching them every day get bigger and bigger and THEN all of a sudden yesterday, they were rudely bitten by rodents! Big teeth marks scrape the sides of all three of them leaving a little more than half of each tomato just hanging there with it’s green seeds open to the air. It’s tomato murder!

Those rodents! I suspect rats because the bites are pretty big. My tomato plant is on a table and the tomatoes are a bit high up for possums but I guess they could be possums or even raccoons or squirrels. There is a wall behind the plant that is a regular squirrel freeway. I wish I had a camera I could set up to film overnight and I could track down the culprit.

In the meantime, I have fashioned a cage out of orange bag netting. I put some wire in a circle inside the netting to keep the tomato in the center of the orange bag. One night down and there are no bites on my remaining two tomatoes. I don’t know how long this will work. Probably at some point those wascally wodents will probably figure out they can chew through the bag. Here’s to hoping I come up with a better solution before then.