The first Sungold of the year had one neat bite taken out of its shoulder. I found it on the porch floor beside its bucket on a Sunday morning in the last week of July, still warm from the sun, and I knew exactly who had done it. We have had a chipmunk standoff every summer since we bought this house in 2019, and this year it started the same week the tomatoes did.
For the record, here's where things stood: 11 tomato plants (12 until the maple limb flattened a Cherokee Purple on July 14), two of them Sungolds, and roughly a dozen ripe cherries lost to small striped thieves before I changed anything.
How I knew it wasn't Gus
My first suspect is always Gus, the groundhog who lives under a shed two yards over. But Gus doesn't climb porch steps, and since we put the hardware cloth along the back fence in June he hasn't been in the beds. Groundhogs also don't take polite single bites. They eat the whole plant down to the soil line, as our bush beans learned the hard way.
Chipmunks are different. They take one or two bites out of the first fruit that colors up, usually low on the plant, then move on to the next one. Squirrels tend to carry a whole tomato off to the fence and eat half of it there. Our damage was all at chipmunk height, the bites were tiny, and on Tuesday Mateo saw one sitting on the rim of the Juliet bucket with its cheeks full, which settled it.
Mateo is ten and takes Sungold duty very seriously. He was outraged on behalf of the plants.
What I tried instead of netting
I did not want to net the whole east bed. Eight tomatoes went into a bed built for six (seven now), and the Florida weave I strung on July 5 is already holding back a wall of leaves. Throwing netting over all that would mean wrestling it every time I picked, and loose netting catches birds and snakes. So I tried smaller things.
- Picking at first blush. This did most of the work. A tomato that has just started to change color (gold for a Sungold, a pinkish shoulder for a Cherokee Purple) will finish ripening on the kitchen counter with no loss in flavor I can taste. The chipmunks wait for nearly ripe fruit, so I just get there a day or two earlier.
- Mesh produce bags over the cherry clusters. I save the red mesh bags that clementines and onions come in, which seemed like a strange habit until now. Slipped over a truss and closed with a twist tie, they let light and air through, and the porch bucket cherries went a full week untouched.
- A shallow dish of water by the porch steps. Some gardeners think chipmunks bite tomatoes partly for the moisture in dry spells, and the last week of July was hot and dry. I can't prove the dish helped, but the bites slowed after I put it out, and it costs nothing.
The produce bags have one real downside: they look like laundry. The porch has white columns, rail boxes full of petunias and a row of terra cotta on the bench, and now there are little red sacks hanging off the tomato buckets. Nate asked if we had started curing salami.
The first real picking
By Friday I had enough for a bowl. Sungolds are the color of late afternoon, an orange that looks lit from inside, and they get a little sweeter after a day on the counter. The first Early Girl came in the same week, along with a handful of Matt's Wild Cherry, which are tiny and red and split if you look at them wrong. The paste tomatoes in the east bed are still hard and green. The San Marzanos and Amish Paste always wait until mid-August and then arrive all at once.
Everything goes on the kitchen scale before it goes anywhere else. The first week of tomatoes came to just under two pounds, which sounds like nothing and felt like a lot of tomato on a Wednesday night. Into the notebook it went, right next to the chipmunk tally.
Since I started picking at first blush, we've lost three tomatoes, all of them ones I missed under a leaf. I can live with that. The chipmunks were technically here first, and I don't trap or poison anything in this yard. Pim would love to help, and he watches them through the screen door with his tail going like a metronome, but his involvement stops there.
What I'd change
The low trusses are the problem every year. Chipmunks don't climb much, so the fruit in the bottom foot of each plant takes almost all the bites. Next summer I'll prune the lowest branches a little higher and leave a clear gap between the soil and the first cluster, which is better for airflow and for keeping soil off the leaves anyway.
Next year: start saving clementine bags in January.
