Could be any number of things - ground hog, deer, raccoons, rabbits, squirrels, woodchuck, turtles, mice, slugs, etc. especially if the garden isn't fenced. It all depends on what kinds of wildlife you have in your area. Unfortunately you are the only one that can monitor your garden and ID the culprit. All we can do is guess. Not much help I know but you must have some idea of what kinds of wildlife you commonly see in your area? To save the remaining ones you will have to enclose them in some fashion so none of the above can get to them - cages or fencing, chicken wire dome, etc. Dave

Thanks so much! Searching this forum, I found the solution of using water and dish soap (Dawn in my case). It worked like a charm, I was amazed at how quickly it exterminated them (especially the little ones)!

A definite possibility. Long of Naples is a butternut type ( C. moschata) in the 35 lb class. Not usually considered a monster squash. But it matches the photos better than anything I have seen. If it has hard solid vines as opposed to the hollow vines of C. pepo and C. maxima, that may be it or a cross. Some of the banana types will get big but the coloring is wrong. They are C. maximas so could be crossed with a bigger C. maxima. Another test, Hungarian Mammoth is touted as one of the few naked seed squash. I have no idea whether it is the same squash as Hungarian Giant, but I don't see that claim for Hungarian Giant.

Dale, I am truly sorry to hear that man's best friend sort of went nuts and failed to mind his manners. I hope you get some more melons and tomatoes from those plants. There must be something about canines and melons, because here in the boondocks, coyotes devour melons like mad and don't even wait for the melons to get close to being ripe. Fred has lost practically all his melons at the old home place to coyotes the last few years, and he used to plant dozens and dozens of plants. I think he's given up on raising melons out there any more, and it is a shame because the old home place has great sandy soil along the Red River. Most of my dogs don't eat tomatoes, but they're fenced out of the garden anyway. Since we have hard clay soil, they can't dig under the fence although they certainly have run amok in the garden when I have forgotten and left the gate open. (A mistake you only make a couple of times before you learn that your garden pays the price for a gate left open.) Do you think your dog was playing or was thirsty? Maybe he or she had knocked over the water dish and sought out the fruit for the water content? Maybe the dog wanted to play ball? My dogs grow their own gourds and pumpkins on the dogyard fence and randomly pull them and play with them whenever the mood strikes, so they don't necessarily get a lot of gourds or pumpkins to full maturity, but they have fun. The stink bugs are atrocious this year. Between them and the grasshoppers, it is a wonder I have a garden left. I haven't had SVBs this year, but have squash bugs, the aforementioned stink bugs (they arrived in May again which is abnormally early), and leaf-footed bugs. You know, pelting the dog with tomatoes might not be a bad idea. Here in our area, when a country dog kills a family chicken, some people tie the dead chicken carcass to the dog's collar and leave it there a couple of days so the dog has to smell that decaying corpse. They claim it teaches the dog a lesson, but uggh, I don't think I could do it. Luckily, our dogs aren't bird killers. Every year we have different gardening challenges, and some years are more challenging than others. You still have plenty of time to get lots more tomatoes and other veggies since the average frost date for your area is....what....about early November? Every winter, I start out the year with such high hopes for the garden, and then it is always a struggle all spring and summer to try to make the dream a reality. If it isn't the weather, it is the pests, or the deer or the rabbits or.....whatever disease is most active that year. What keeps us all going? Probably that old saying "there's always next year". Since we've lived here, every animal known to mankind has attempted to destroy my garden, though thankfully not all in the same year. As soon as I figure out how to exclude one type of wildlife, another one figures out how to get into the garden. I've seen animals in/around my garden that I never knew existed....until we moved here, I didn't know that there was such a thing as a ring-tailed cat. (That particular wild critter likes to eat our young poultry.) I'd never expected to have a beaver killing our trees, or a cougar hanging out at the edge of the garden, or skunks digging up sunflowers or turtles eating tomatoes. It is always something......and I didn't know that deer ignore those lists of "plants that deer won't eat" and eat them anyway. Recently, I noticed 1 lone pigweed plant in the corner of the potato bed. I kept meaning to dig it up or cut it down---seems like it zoomed from 6" tall to 5' tall in about a week.....but before I got around to it, a deer ate it. Ha! At least the deer are good for something. I think I grew okra here for 5 years before I ever got a pod because the deer would jump the then-three-foot-tall garden fence and eat every plant down to the ground at some point during the season. All that's ever worked for me is the 7' tall fence we have now, and it only works if I remember to always close both gates. One reason I haven't expanded the garden more and more every year is because it means moving the 7' tall fence or errecting another one. I have friends who garden in towns, both large cities and small towns, and they often find fruit missing from their plants, or sometimes entire plants gone, and believe it is two-legged critters stealing their fruit and veggies, flowers and herbs. So, I guess a garden is never truly 'safe'. Hopefully the second half of this gardening year will turn out better than the first. Or, as I always say, there's always next year..... Dawn