I don't know which species raided our garden when I was growing up, but just about the time that the peas were ready to harvest, they disappeared. The peas were harvested in an orderly manner. All the pea pods were picked on that side of the row until they got to a certain spot and then the rest were left on the vine. Both sides of the row were harvested at the same time in the same direction. The spot that the harvesting stopped was about the same too, but not always. One of the rows had one side harvested less than all the others. My dad at first thought that it was rabbits, but rabbits can't reach up 5 feet to get the top pods. Cows like peas as well, but they eat the whole plant. We had a milk cow that got into our garden where I live now and she ate one plant at a time. Pods and all. Mice eat only the ripest pods on the lowest levels. Deer browse. They don't eat only the peas that are in one spot. They pick and choose what they eat. They also knock down peas and vines as they go for the best. No pea plants were harmed. We couldn't figure it out. The next day the rest of the peas were harvested in the same manner. There was not a pea pod left on the vines. They used to take our green beans in the same way. The spinach and swiss chard leaves were harvested in much the same manner. I can't be sure that they were taken by aliens as mice and rabbits eats the leaves and leave the stalks. Deer also eat spinach and swiss chard leaves like that. Deer won't eat green beans! Beets were another matter. The greens were there, but the beets were gone! When we harvested the beets, the tops came up quite easily. There was no beet root attached. Slugs and other insects have this habit of cutting off the tops. When we dug down to find the rest of it, it wasn't there! It was like somebody had dug up the beet root and cut off the top and then placed the top back over the spot to show that nothing had happened. When I was older, the beet tops were taken too. Nothing was left. The only thing that was never harvested was the rhubarb. Rhubarb leaves are poisonous. Only the stalk is fit to eat. I guess that they didn't want something that tasted that bad. Sometimes after a rainstorm, we used to find horseshoe like footprints in the soft soil. The horseshoe tracks looked like they were turned 90 degrees with the open part of the shoe pointed inward. We also used to find misshapen long oval prints too. I guess that both the tall greys and the short greys used to raid our garden. Sometimes no raiding was done when we found these types of footprints. They might have been checking to see if the vegetables were ready and decided to wait.

How do you know it wasn't a lazy neighbor wearing boot disguises. They appreciated the harvest that you worked for.

How big was your garden. Just a few pounds of veggies, or bushels and bushels.

sounds like a job for wallace and gromet, the curse of the wererabbit!!!!

We never had a really big garden. It was always a lot of work to look after it and as the only ones interested in actually taking care of it were my dad and oldest sister, it didn't grow much over my childhood. It was about 45 feet by 60 feet. We only had a few perennials like rhubarb, so it was mostly dig and plant and weed. I liked eating the produce, but I didn't like all the other work. My dad used to tell us boys to "Stay out of the garden!" He worried that we would trample everything. We did trample things once when I was about 5, so he was right to warn us away. We didn't seem to have a lazy neighbour as all our neighbours had gardens too. They all kept their gardens much better than ours. With the pea incident, my dad wanted to stay awake all night to catch the culprit at it, but he went to bed at his usual time, so the culprit was never caught. Sometimes some of our neighbours also had trouble with keeping produce in their gardens. Same modus operandi. ( This last phrase comes from police shows, so don't get the idea that I know latin. ) Wallace and Grommit would have done a much better job of catching the thief than my dad. They wouldn't have suddenly had the urge to go to bed instead of watching the garden.

It would seem to me that if aliens were raiding your dads garden there would have been some evidence to support that...UFO sightings, a neighbor seeing something unusual. If not, then I would say that there was a cunning thief in the neighborhood.

www.manataka.org/page245.html .......... any of the tracks look like this ?

This post has been edited by The Boxer: Apr 21 2008, 10:30 PM

Surely, no one who is advanced enough to traverse the universe needs to raid a small garden? And if they for some reason do, why would they not take the rhubarb? I refuse to believe there is anyone, man or alien that dislikes rhubarb.

I do not like ruhbarb. But then I have been accused of being a beast as well.

Boot disguises? How can you make your boot smaller and lower your ground pressure? The short grey tracks were six inches long by two inches wide and shaped like a C with half an inch of width to the letter. I sank in the garden a full inch while they only sank in half an inch. I was twelve or thirteen at the time. My sister has since reported that her rhubarb was missing last year from her garden, but I can't comment on who took it. I don't know.