Kitchen Garden Forum

This time it's French beans and sprouts. My husband made me a cage of chicken wire in a wooden frame which I put sprouts - about 5 ins tall, French beans etc to harden off. We went away at the weekend so I left everything out instead of keeping them in the greenhouse and when we got back something had eaten all the sprouts down to the base of the stem and most of the beans. There's a couple of places where something small seems to have scraped away a hollow of soil and crawled under the frame which was standing of hard earth. So basically, would this have been a rat or mice? I think the hole is too small for a rat but wonder whether a mouse could have eaten so much. Husband thinks a rat can get into anything. Any ideas?
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Granny

I believe mice/rodents are always a culprit, especially if seeds are sown direct to the seedbed. Even in your frame, the pods of the emerging beans may have been too tasty for mice to resist.

Another pest (which has recently wiped out half of my French Beans sat off the floor on a table in the garden) are slugs & snails. Slug pellets are the obvious answer here.

There's still time to sow some more, this time with precautions!

Colin

What size of hole can rats manage?

Here's a quote from a US site:

"... rats only need a hole the size of a quarter to fit through."

The size of that is apparently 24.26 mm (0.955 in).

Get your ruler out, Granny.

Alan

The gap is about 2" wide but less than 1/2" high. So probably a mouse.
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Granny

Last year we had a plague of rats and I blocked all the access routes at the bottom of our fences. On several occasions though I went out into the garden to chase them away and couldn't believe how they managed to disappear under the tiniest little holes in the bottom of the fence. So don't rule rats out! They seem to be able to squash themselves almost flat.