Gardening woes, plants being eaten or destroyed, maybe crows?

What about mouse traps, dried blood, coyote urine, etc as deterrents? What about row covers that are secured to the ground?

 

Something scurrying under the plastic could also be a vole. They are vegetarians (as opposed to moles) & they are the bain of my gardening existence.

 

If you haven’t seen the documentary Racoon Nation you should give it a view. Entertaining and informative. I live in the middle of a city and have to deal with raccoons (arch enemy number 1), deer (only occasionally), great blue herons, possums and squirrels. I live literally blocks from downtown.

I use an electric fence set with two strings under a foot tall around my fish pond and garden. My yard is totally fenced in with six foot fences mostly covered over with plants and then the garden areas are also contained with make shift fencing.

Our dogs are also omnivorous and I lost all but two cauliflower starts to our little dogs and they thinned the peas, collards and kale this year. Replanted and we will still have some good eats. Will hopefully be more vigilant about the raspberries and blueberries as they ripen. Our garden areas are fairly intensively gardened. Here is a post from earlier this spring. https://www.gardenstew.com/threads/garden-is-protected.39859/ Good luck on combatting your garden intruders.

 

It is looking a lot like vole work to me, mate.
If you can get your cam working again...I would just put it on the ground near some of those plants and let it go off should something amble by.
This is getting to be a a serious problem that you have there.

 

In our garden it is pigeons which pull plants out of the the soil after the plants have been planted. Crows normally only eat meat. Certainly the ones which live in our Ash tree have never done any damage. They might cause problems if they are trying to get at the small creatures hiding under the plastic.

 

Interesting.. i've never heard of voles till this thread.. i guess this would be better than mice? I'm concerned if mice due to disease they carry, getting on things like the beets in the ground or a few of the beans that might survive, even..

I found one of those $40 electroshock traps on amazon, unsure what to do here.

I thought mice for another odd reason at first.. we have 2 neighbors down the street, just 1 house apart that are literal hoarders like the show.. you can see things overflowing onto their porch.. i thought maybe the source was there if so.

Is there another way to deal with voles though, or is my only recourse to buy this trap and see what it catches?

I will also try the cam on the ground.. ill put my one remaining pepper plant (that i never used still in its store potting package, unharmed left outside), stick it right in front in the ground this time and see what gives

 

The mice in this part of the world do not carry any communicable diseases. Very unlikely for any disease to pass from them to humans through vegetables. Even Weil's disease from Rats has to be caught by touching fresh rat urine.

 

I have no voles mice rats or moles in my garden because there are always loads of cats.

 

The town I live in has mice. The only houses that don't fight the battle are homes with good resident mousers (cats).

 

Interesting few nights of video captures in the garden.. what i'm seeing more than anything are a surprise.. slugs.. seems to be quite a few.. some hanging on plants.. but my small test area i'm filming they havent attacked the usual plants yet, if in fact slugs.

Last night in addition, a cat appeared (which would be a good thing if moles, voles, mice etc).

Could slugs have done this level of damage.. it would seem to me it would take quite a few.. though in a 2 foot section on the video you can see at least 3.

 

Mice will eat anything that doesn`t eat them first ! Yes ,, slugs can do that amount of damage !