Marauding Birds are Definitely Eating My Tomato Plants

It was definitely marauding birds dead set on their evil plans to destroy and consume all the vegetable seedlings in the garden. Those vile devils went back and ate even more of my tomato plants, there are twenty-five tomato seedlings left out of fifty-two tomato plants with eight of those just consisting of lower leaves since their growing tips were nipped by sharp little beaks. I'm leaving the ones with nipped growing tips in the ground partly from frustration and partly to see if they'll sprout new growing tips at the joint where the lower leaves meet the stem. More than half of my tomato plants were eaten. So now not only a fence is surrounding the garden but I have bird netting stretched over the fencing.

I was ready to give up on the garden this year but my husband insisted rather stridently that all that work and effort to till and get the garden going was not going to waste, no matter how much more money we had to spend on it, even if we had to go out and buy expensive store bought seedlings.

It was a really warm winter with only one snowfall that wasn't even hard enough to stick around on the ground, which is probably why there are so many birds. Usually after the winter we find a few dead birds around the woody area probably from starvation and exposure, but this year there are birds everywhere and their calls and voices are deafening. Also our neighbor who had four dogs has moved away and the dogs were probably keeping the birds at bay. Plus it has been a very dry year so the birds have probably turned to eating plants to get water. Bastards.

It's late in the season to be starting tomato plants but I went ahead and planted more tomato seeds. While at it, I started five different varieties of summer squash/zucchini, cucumbers, bitter melon, and luffa in peat pellets because the weather temperatures have been very volatile and things aren't sprouting in the garden yet or maybe the birds have already eaten them.