Garden Mysteries: What’s Devouring Our Broccoli Leaves?

We noticed our broccoli plants had started to show signs of being chewed. We thought it was possums because large leaves had completely disappeared. We moved a portable shade house over the plants and expected that to solve the problem. By this time a lot of the leaves had already been eaten.

Three days later, more leaves were gone. We decided to secure the shade house by adding weights around the edges and set up a trail camera on the outside.

4 days later even more leaves had gone and the camera hadn’t recorded anything. At this point, we were baffled. How could something be eating so much, so fast, without leaving a single clue on camera?

It was time to set up the trailcam again.

This time I placed it inside the shade house and this time we had success. Rats! We previously had trouble with them eating our corn, but didn’t think they could eat so much so quickly.

This is what they are like after another week. I guess the only interesting thing we can now do is to see how far they go. Will they eat all the stems?

We haven’t found a practical way for us to keep rats out, so it looks like we won’t be having home grown broccoli this year.