tedgrowsit - How the heck did you get 185 pounds of potatoes out of that? You planted five varieties at 3 pounds each - that is only 15 pounds of seed potatoes. We bought probably 30 pounds of seed potatoes this year and I just started digging ours out today (had to stop since it is so hot out again). After digging about half of them up, we've only netted around 20 pounds. Not at all happy; last year we had about 80 pounds of potatoes - but I am digging out the Yukon Golds right now which are smaller than the Kennebec variety. The seed potatoes you purchased - were they large? I've read conflicting reports that indicate that if you use small seed potatoes (basically use the whole potato as the seed), you'll get smaller yields - but I don't know if that is true. That is what we did this year; we went through the bins at Rural King and got the small seed potatoes and planted them whole.Affordable Website Design Here is a link that might be useful: BsnTech Gardening Blog

Trust me when I say you don't want to find anything in those sticky traps ... it will be alive, it will scream, it will squirm, and it will be awful. Snap traps are far less upsetting for everyone ... the mouse is just dead, and the clean-up crew doesn't have to deal with a screaming, squirming, suffering creature. I'll admit we did have one snaptrap victim vanish ... it was there and seemed dead (not a close inspection (just noted from across the basement), and then a few hours later when we went to clean it up, the trap had moved a foot to by a crevace in the floor - concrete floor, not a way out, just a crevace - and the it was empty. No idea what happened there ... but there was no screaming, no squirming, nothing like a gluetrap. I've cleaned those up at a workplace ... it was traumatizing ... and worse, there were two.

Buy some plastic rat traps (you can find them on Amazon), and bait them with raisins. Place one or two traps near damaged plants or obvious entryways into your yard. Do this after sundown, and collect the traps as early in the morning as you can, else you may trap/kill some friendlies. Mix up the trap placement. There is a fair chance packrats are contributing to your damage. Left unchecked, they will make more packrats -- quickly -- and may wind up inflicting costly damage to more than just your plants. IE??? Seriously??

I recommend against getting cats as working animals. They're not reliable, they're not all good mousers, and they usually get the bad end of the stick when they are disappointing to their owners. Cats should only be kept by people who actively like cats, want them as companion animals, and are willing to accept them on whatever terms the cats offer. If I were you, I'd set some traps so that I could be sure that I'm actually dealing with mice. You could also have rats, voles, squirrels/ground squirrels, or any number of other pests. I would want to know who the culprits were, and if my own trapping didn't take care of them, I'd call a professional to deal with them. I would also recommend you pick the fruits at first blush and let them ripen indoors in a protected location. I doubt that, this time of year in Calgary, leaving the tomatoes to ripen fully on the vine will do much for their flavor. Not to mention that ripening them on the vine will take forever, even in a heated tunnel. You might also try putting the low-hanging tomatoes in organza bags. The weave on them is usually tight enough to deter small rodents like mice long enough to get the tomatoes to first blush, although you should keep in mind that you may not be dealing with small rodents, and you should also keep in mind that, once fruits start smelling really ripe, the rodents may become more determined and try to gnaw through the bags and succeed, so picking them right at first blush is key. For your amount of tomatoes, it's a lot of fuss, but I doubt you have many more weeks to harvest tomatoes unless you are planning to build a much more solid greenhouse around them in the immediate future, and the low-hanging ones are likely to the be only ones you manage to get to maturity before it's too cold.