I also have a garden that normally only gets weekend attention. Good results with beets, carrots, onions, broccoli, bibb or buttercruch type lettuce, butternut squash, lima beans. I grow these too but there's the occasional overripe runaways: peas, summer squash, sweet corn, green and wax beans. I also keep trying pumpkins, but they get hit with powdery mildew every August, so its a race between getting some viable fruit vs. the kill off. In 2010 I had a grand total of 2 good pumpkins. My butternut squash vines also die off, but enough fruit matures in time that I get a good harvest. I've given up on remote tomatoes entirely; late blight always gets them. I've tried a weekly fungicide program on the PM and blight, but it only seems to slightly delay the inevitable, so I've decided its just not worth the effort. I'll introduce supposedly resistant varieties instead. Usually for beets, carrots, lettuce, summer squash, corn, beans, peas, I sow 2 or more varieties, sometimes at staggered times so I get a longer harvest. (Corn is always staggered!) Last year for instance, in the beets department I had a row each of Early Wonder and Detroit Dark Red sowed at the same time, with the plan that EW would be earlier. Their germination, top growth and tasty roots were in lock-step the whole season for size and time of harvest. The only way I could them apart after picking is the EW's were slightly purple-pink whereas the Detroit's were, well, dark red! In the carrot department, I had a row each of Danvers and Nantes sowed at the same time. The Danvers out-performed the Nantes by being earlier, bigger, and more uniform. Nantes came in later and had a lot of forked and split roots. (This year I'll pit Danvers against Chantenay.)

I wish I could give the person who came up with the bright idea of using RRD as a multiflora control method a good screaming at. It makes as much sense as cutting the rodent population by giving them the plague. I'll put in a plug for Rosa carolina, which last I heard, was still not getting RRD, and is an attractive and fragrant rose, and some strains have a litt;le rebloom. Likewise for R. californica and Burnet roses. Rosa palustris and setigera should be safe picks, though strictly once-bloomers. Aside from switching to wild American roses such as those, there's not much you can do, unless your can talk all of your neighbors into adopting a sane multiflora control method (e.g., bulldozer). Virtually all garden roses, no matter how disease resistant they may be otherwise, are vulnerable, whether they're OGRs or moderns, as are Eurasian wild roses and even many American wild roses. I suppose you could try Baltimore Belle, Souvenir de Brod, Commander Gillette or Bonica, since the latter has shown at least *some* resistance, and the others are hybrids of resistant species. This post was edited by ffff on Sun, Nov 2, 14 at 15:28

If you have squirrels in the area, they of course have excellent climbing ability, and one of their behaviors is to prune the tips of tree branches off, presumably in the course of feeding...which sounds similar to what is being done to your tomatos. After one particularly bad spring, my whole neighborhood was littered with branch tips thrown down by squirrels. Squirrels and chipmunks also both dig random holes here and there in the search for food, or--in the case of chipmunks--preparatory to making a nest. If you used mushroom or any other form of loose mulch, you may have imported a mouse, rat, or something else along with it, in which case it is probably living in the garden itself. Therefore, the protective screening would of course not solve the problem. Repellants might do a better job if that is the case, but if your garden is the only feasible home in the area for the critter, it will probably resist leaving. I know that chipmunks can climb up an entire sunflower stem to eat the sunflower's seeds; maybe other rodents besides squirrels also have climbing abilities. The random nipping and destruction sounds suspiciously like a groundhog (they like to take nips out of things as a sort of turf-claiming thing), but unless you have ever seen one of them around or have a mound with a rather large groundhog-sized hole, you can rule that out, especially in the city. If your mulch is from a more rural location, I would incline toward the chipmunk theory. They are also quite territorial, and used to demolish the contents of some of my plant pots-- mainly because, I think, they didn't like where I had placed them. Chipmunks like to clear certain areas so they have a clear line of sight. If your mulch was from a more rural location, a chipmunk could have made a burrow in it, and been swept up along with the mulch.

Get a dog! Or at least get your neighbors to get them! I live in Burlington County also, and that is what solved our problem with the deer. We have a new neighbor on the east side with a young and noisy Akita, and a Siberian husky that (sadly) spends his life on a chain on the other side. The groundhog and rabbits are still around but the damage they do is minimal compared to the deer. Believe me, I understand how upsetting it is after all the back breaking labor that goes into gardening but try not to take it personally, the deer are just hungry and they have been forced into our world by overdevelopement of their habitat. Have you searched the web for home-grown methods - like spraying water mixed with raw egg, cutting worn socks (dark colors to match leaves and mulch) into little pieces and scattering them thru the areas the deer invade - they don't like the human smell..though you would have to do this sort of thing often....anyway, there are more than a few websites with this kind of information. And maybe someone on this site will have some suggestions. You could also get a fence around the back yard, something high though! I am curious as to what you have planted, though I know they will eat alot of the so called deer resistant plants.