Sweet 100s in a tangled mess.
Ready for picking.
An Unusual SuspectAs you can see in the photo above, there is a wound in the side of this otherwise lovely tomato. I have been seeing this type of damage on more fruit than I care to acknowledge and assumed early on that crows were to blame. I covered the plants as best I could with netting and thought this would solve the problem. It did not. At least not completely. The netting did not come down over the sides of the plants in places but crows could not possibly get into the places that I was now finding damaged tomatoes. Annoyed, I again made an assumption and concluded that those ever-hateful house sparrows were the suspects. While in the garden the other day I caught a flurry of movement in one of the beds and watched in horror as an adult male Baltimore oriole flew out from among the tomato plants and into a tree. It all made perfect sense. I was convinced that those evil crows or sparrows were causing the damage, but I find that a seemingly harmless bird, which we attract in the spring with oranges, would go after perfectly beautiful, orange fruit in the garden.
Bumble bee on Eupatorium (Joe-pye weed).
An unknown bug on Rudbeckia.
2 comments:
How sad to learn a favorite bird is the guilty one. Kind of like when I discovered that Roadrunners ate smaller birds and had to witness a murder.
Just cut off the bad and let that beautiful bird have a wack at your tomatoes.
Patti - Thankfully we are overloaded with tomatoes, so I am accepting the loss of a few. I'd rather he choose ones that are somewhat small or malformed, however.
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