The mystery began earlier this week. Call Mark Harmon!! I need his help again. This houseplant which is kept on the back porch for winter WAS covered with leaves and branches… note that now the tops have been chewed off. The real kicker… the branches are nowhere to be found. There are no dead leaves lying around. HMMMMMM!
Getting ready for the garden requires tomato and pepper plants. Don’t these look nice? I went to the feed store Tuesday and bought them. They did not have everything I wanted so I was told to come back on Thursday… a new shipment would be arriving. So we did, and we purchased the remaining things we needed.
Because the night temps were to get down to about 40 degrees last night we decided to bring the first batch of plants into the back porch area and we placed the ones we just bought there also. Both flats of plants were set on top of the chest freezer on the back porch.
This morning I went to the freezer to get some okra out…. WHAT???? Where did they go????
One flat of plants was just fine, but the ones we had JUST purchased yesterday looked like THIS!
Those bare stalks on the right are all that remains of my grape tomato plants which were very nice plants when I went to bed last night.
My “Worlds Hottest Habanera” pepper plant has nothing left above the soil level. Obviously only the peppers are hot, not the plant itself.
Cayenne peppers… just a piece of one left. Whatever ate it REALLY liked these.
Jalapeño… 4 of the 6 plants have been topped. And again, nothing left behind. There are no leaves, no bits of stalk, nothing lying around to show that something sat there and ate my plants. Something cut the stalks and hauled the trimmings away.
HMMMMM…. Do you think it might have been one of these???
You have to take the bad with the good. I LOVE living here in the country, but unfortunately that means we get invaded by outside critters on occasion. Perhaps we need to pen the 3 yard cats up in the back porch tonight??? Call Zoe… she’s the expert at this!
Hopefully we can get rid of the varmint soon, but in the meantime we will have to find another place to leave the plants on cool nights.
Get out your game camera!
ReplyDeleteGoodness, Kathy. We gardeners can do without visitors like that. That's a shame. Tomato plants are toxic, so I guess they were safe.
ReplyDeleteI start plants from seed each year. Last year the same thing happened to several of my pepper seedlings. My dear dad suspected cut worms. I can't say for sure, but he was pretty up on gardening. They cut the plant off and eat the leaves and stems. That could be your culprit. These nasty "creatures" overwinter in soil. It's possible your culprit could be a cutworm. They seem to be especially fond of peppers.
oxo