CaraRose, in my experience nobody but gardening nuts like here on GW even thinks about planting crops in September, and so I can never find anything to plant at a nursery. I've had really good luck with planting seed in mid September, and then covering the new seedlings in October. Still, I wish you luck finding bedding plants!

Thank you to all who took the time to read my long, novel-like chronicle of symptoms and suspicions. Already working on the cutworm collars...and I had called the exterminator even before I wrote my diatribe. He layed traps. Only one mouse thus far. Oh...and I did start on my own personal comost pile earlier in the summer. But these pictures I put up were of garden #1, during the summer. I bought two cubic yards of the best compost our local landscaping/nursery man carried. I was lucky that my husband just happened to take me to pick it up because I had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA how much I had purchased. I about died when I went outside from paying for compost in the office to see a large tractor dumping the last scoop full of it into the now overloaded bed of my bewildered husbands big Silverado truck! (see picture...which is only half of what I bought. The first half was put out front!) Honestly, I thought it would be a few bags similar to what I had purchased at Home Depot! Talk about a newbie! At any rate, all of that has been tilled into the garden now before I even planted for the cold crops. I already have sprouted brussel sprout seedlings waiting to be planted again. It is not due to stop raining here until Sunday; if the ground is not too soden, I will plant them and the others that are ready then, place collars on anything that remains, and then put chicken wire tops on everything until they outgrow them. Now, after all this sage advice, I guess it could have been birds after all. Blue Jays? Now those I WOULD see every morning, along with smaller sparrow-type birds, in their busy little worlds, pecking away in my garden, while I opened the cupboard to make coffee. I usually let my dog out to pee pee and she would make a beeline for them. But who knows how long they were pecking away in there and how big some of them were earlier in the morning hours. Maybe even an owl or larger bird? But I think those are dedicated carnivores. (When I lived in Santa Barbara I once saw a hawk swoop down and carry off a pigeon. It was devastating to me. Poor bird. I am so grateful to be at the top of the food chain. But the seagulls will snatch whole sandwiches out of your hand while you are busy admiring the ocean. So I know that birds take things, sometimes heavy things, up into the air and away. Maybe a 2 1/2 watermelon plant? ) Still a bit baffled. But the collars and cages are coming out until the plants are big enough to survive. This post was edited by lindsaybev on Thu, Nov 20, 14 at 13:26

Ever go out after dark with a flashlight? Gardening is not just day time fun. I use a little Ammonia in a spray bottle.

The seedlings are anywere from 2 days to 2 weeks in the ground, making them 8-10 weeks old. Some of the plants were very frail and others were pretty tough. As we've gone along, the plant killer has moved higher on the the stems. My most recent attempt, which was right before the mouse theory here, was to put a small cone of plastic rabbit fence around each plant. It created about a six inch diameter circle around the 11 remaining seedlings. I figured that if it is a small rabbit, I would either keep it out or at least be able to see the way the animal got around the barrier. I'm down to 9 plants now. two more have been cut off right above the 8 inches of vinyl tubing that I put on the protect the stems. There was no visible disturbance of the cone. It's like it either came down from the sky or up from the ground. I planted the remaining five seedlings in large pots and put them by my front porch. At least they'll get me a few nice tomatoes this season, but it looks like I won't be needing my canning supplies in August. As for next year, I'm going to start working on a plan for some sort of wire mesh cones that will be burried in the ground around the plants. If it is a mouse, it is more than likely that this particular one will be dead by this time next year, and that others won't share it's desire to kill my tomato seedlings. However, I'll be prepared just in case.