I am laughing my head off because I am having the same battle. My prize Gold Medal tomatoes that I have been anxiously waiting all summer for have been attacked, both the lower ones and the higher ones. I put rigid meshing around them and the bugger chewed thru them too! Personally, I'm thinking raccoon, but who knows. I'm finding cherries, green and ripe all over the ground with the insides sucked out. Other tomatoes they aren't bothering. It seems the tomatoes that are in the ground next to a fence are at the most risk. My container tomato plants have had fewer attacks. It's not fair! I am going to try blood meal for next year, altho permanently eliminating them has crossed my mind! I have now picked most of my tomatoes and brought them in otherwise I won't have one to eat! AAAHHH! Sharon

Worms will eat what you feed them. Try to remember that in the wild they tend to be small so that they can survive on less food. When some animal walks by and drops the "motherload" on their location, they will gather at the location for a feast. Proximity to other worms triggers breeding and a central food source will result in new worms. They will gain size rapidly so as to store energy in their body and they will make use of the excess food to produce more offspring. When the large pieces of food get used up, the fat worms won't be able to sustain their size and will begin to starve. They are now too big to fit in the small gaps of soil to hide or find bits of decaying matter below. They will starve to death and because of this, they will reproduce for the rest of their lives. The resulting offspring will not have excess food, so they will remain small so that they can maneuver through the topsoil and eat dead roots/leaves and whatever else they can find while waiting for the next cow pie or whatever. Worms can go their whole lives without getting to the assumed normal adult worm size though they will have every other aspect of an adult worm and be ready to grow large when the conditions are right for that. So what this amounts to is that if you suspect you have 2# of worms, you can give 2# of food per day or per week or per month if you wish. Worms use death as a survival mechanism and as long as they have enough time to pull off a few rounds of emergency breeding, they are harder to accidentally kill than most people think. The growth of a worm is a one way trip though. They can get big and fat when conditions are right, but the only way for an individual worm to shrink to a less hungry size is to breed and get out of the way for its offspring. As long as the bin is not too dry, you can theoretically do some amazing worm tricks by feeding way too much and then stopping feeding for long periods. I try to give my worms everything I possibly can without buying anything specifically to feed them or diverting something to them that could be used for something better. For example, if I don't want to eat bread loaf ends I'll feed them to my dog but I get over 2# of free junk newspapers per month that I use as worm bedding. Colored cardboard and newspaper is supposedly not harmful like it used to be in the olden days because it's understood that it generally gets landfilled and leaching into ground water is verbotten* within the current time period... also, in the '70s legislation* was put in place to prevent anything that may be mouthed by a reasonably parented child from containing harmful compounds. If newspaper and cereal boxes don't say "keep out of reach of children" it's likely that they don't contain lead or other toxic compounds and I put them in the bin. *I'm speaking specifically about the USA. Most countries have environmental protections that meet or exceed US standards. Some countries may not have standards, or items that can be standardized, or may not enforce their standards.

Well after 30 minutes in the garage with the Jeep running the rat was still alive. Since I didn't want to leave it running any longer and was concerned about the carbon monoxide getting into the house, I put the cage into the truck, drove to a remote location and put a bullet into the rat. A 9mm hollow point does a number on a rat at close range. I came home, cleaned as much of the guts as possible out and put the trap back in place. This morning, nothing. The good thing is the food wasn't eaten either so nothing got in there. I suspect the varmit either saw the rat in the cage earlier and decided he didn't want the same faith, or wasn't attracted to rat guts. Oh well. I left the trap out there today and maybe I will catch something during the day. I'll clean it out after work today and hope I have better luck tonight. Have a good day everyone!

A big favorite at my house is carmelized shallots over sliced Brussel sprouts (the recipe is on epicurious Brussel Sprout Hash w/carmelized shallots.) I will, in fact, be making it on Thanksgiving. As for chocolate, I gave it up 17 years ago during a period of intense migraine problems because it seemed to be a trigger. I also gave up nuts and coffee at that same time (all suspected triggers). The only thing I missed enough to gamble & reintroduce to my diet were nuts. I decided I didn't need the extra calories of chocolate so I've just never gone back to eating it.