[Garden] What do to about mice in the tomatoes?

[gcmichal at fes.uwaterloo.ca]

Dear Maddy and Others,
It could be something larger than mice.  If it is just mice, then keeping the 
tomatoes off the ground could be a big help.  Paul and I did quite a bit of 
staking and tying over the last few weeks, but the growth is so good and the 
crop so bountiful that many of the big fruits are weighing down  branches and 
lying on the ground.  I ran out of stakes at home and have no more to 
contribute.  We used strips torn off an old nightie for ties.  Because the stems 
are soft as well as heavy, it is best to use something like cloth strips to 
provide the support without cutting into the stems. Does anyone have some extra 
stakes and cloth strips to contribute?

I hope it rains today.  I was at the garden Sunday afternoon and quite a few 
things were showing moisture stress.  Unfortunately, nobody else was there and I 
didn't have the combination number and couldn't water - I even brought a 
sprinkler along to do it while I went on weeking.  The celery looks next to go - 
it has many yellow leaves showing.  The potatoes are mostly beyond help.  There 
were two problems.  One is the hard clay soil down below about 6 inches, which 
prevented deeper use of the soil by the plants.  The second was too little 
water.  Last Wednesday I came late and found that the potatoes had been watered, 
but when I took a stick to check the depth that the water had penetrated, I 
found that it was only about 2 centimeters. So Paul and I rewatered the 
potatoes, melons, peppers, and tomatoes, as well as a small garden between the 
trees (the one with marigolds and basil) that was badly dried out. However, 
there are a fair number of potatoes, some of them good size, to be harvested, 
and some have been dug out already.  Best to take them from the dead and dying 
plants first, and let the ones in better shape keep on working.

I weeded the weed patch on Sunday.  The few desired weeds were overgrown by a 
massive amount of bindweed, two kinds of thistle, velvet leaf, wild millet and a 
few minor items.  I left all the purslane, pigweed, and lambs quarters, but 
aside from two big pigweed plants, there were hardly any of the desired weeds.  
The patch had never been watered and is bone dry, which is preventing any young 
plants from germinating and coming up. I weeded the gooseberries and the nearby 
chard and beets and pulled up a big pigweed that was choking a gooseberry.  I 
laid that pigweed on the weed patch to contribute any ripe seeds to the effort.

A note about the peppers.  I raised three kinds of plants, hot yellow, sweet 
yellow, and red bell.  Unfortunately, the markers came out of many of the pots 
and I'm not sure which are sweet Hungarian yellow and which are hot yellow.  The 
sweet should keep on growing fairly large fruits, and the hot should be smaller 
and narrower.  The bell peppers can be used green or fully ripe and red.  Maybe 
those who prefer red can mark a few of the plants to ripen to fully red and the 
others can be picked at will, green or perhaps red if they stay on that long.

- Greg Michalenko

Quoting Madeline Rosamond <m.rosamond at gmail.com>:

> Hi, all:
> Anyone have any good tips for keeping the mice (or whatever) out of
> tomatoes? I picked up quite a few half-gnawed tomatoes off the ground
> yesterday and nothing is sadder than a lost tomato! I didn't find anything
> too helpful online except using poison and mouse traps, neither of which
> sound ideal.
> 
> I also replanted one row of mesculin mix today so hopefully we'll get more
> salad greens. Yum!
> 
> Cheers,
> Maddy
>