FarmI wrote:
"David Hare-Scott" wrote in message
...
FarmI wrote:
I've been working on building a Fruit Cage for months now (snip)

What specifically are you excluding?

I'm trying to exclude all birds, all snakes, blue tongue lizards. Skinks
would be OK.

I have some toothy beastie eating my ripe tomatos right now. I
think it is rats because there are holes with
scrabble marks in the garden but cannot tell for sure. I have put
down ratsak but the chomping continues and no corpses appear. I
don't think it is birds as we never see any birds on the bushes and
the attack is always from the underside. What else could it be? Any
ideas?

Rats, bush rats (is there a difference?), mice, blue tongues, some of
the other bigger lizard varieties, birds of all sizes. Dunno really.
Just guesses but I'm sure we've had all of those things (except
perhaps bush rats because I have no idea whaatsoever what they are
other than the fact that some friends have complained of them). Each
year we find we have to cover more and more things with bird netting
to get a crop.

It is interesting to see the seasonal variation that you get. You can
understand why people speak of 'plagues' of things. I mean other than the
really obvious plagues such as locusts.

Last year we were hit by fruit fly and possums, they were lifting up the
nets and doing all kinds of things to get to the fruit (the possums that
is). This year neither. The stone fruit harvest has been pretty good, lost
some to fungus but not to beasties. We are bottling plums almost daily. I
have fresh peaches for breakfast. :-))

A new tomato cultivar, yellow pear, is proving a winner as a salad vege.
They are about 4cm long and yellow when ripe and shaped like a pear (duh!).
Good producers, good flavour, not subject to pests too much. We gave away a
couple of kilos to neighbours as they would be too fiddly to bottle by far.

Somehow the pumpkins and the sweet potatos got too close (don't ask). Fight
ye buggers fight! Pumpkins have the upper hand right now but the chances
are the sweet taters will outlast them if the weather stays humid as the
pumkins will get mould and be set back giving the taters some light.

On the whole not a bad season so far.

David