Who's Been Eating My Beets?

I've always wanted to grow those great big juicy beets like I see in the farmers' markets in Costa Rica. They're so big, I always assumed the farmers used lots of chemical fertilizers to grow them. I grew beets in South Carolina, and they got fairly big, but once the hot summer weather set in they just seemed to poop out.

My first beet crop (if you look closely you can see the damage done by the rats)

Well, I planted some beets here in my new raised beds, and gave them plenty of good, organic soil, plus just a little bit of chemical fertilizer as a side dressing. It doesn't really get hot here, and those beets just kept getting bigger and bigger, until they began to look like the ones in the farmers market. My dream had come true.

I didn't pay them much attention for a couple of weeks, and when I checked them out again, I discovered that some animal had been gnawing away at the tops of the bulbs. My gardener saw the culprits one day -- two big fat rats in my neighbor's compost pile. My neighbor had been putting his kitchen refuse in my compost pile, but then I noticed he was putting in animal products, such as fish and meat bones and fat. I told him several times not to do this because it would attract vermin. But I guess he thought I was just giving him advice, not telling how it HAD TO BE. Eventually I had to put a lock on the gate between our lots, because he just wouldn't listen.

So now he has started his own compost hole, and it is attracting rats, and they're eating my beets. I told him about the problem, but he insists they are gophers, despite my eyewitness accounts. He's a hard headed person.

I've put out rat traps for several nights, but the nights the traps are out, the rats don't come around. And as soon as I don't put the traps out, the next morning I see evidence that the rats have been at it again. They must be able to pick up my scent on the rat traps. The upshot is that I have lost my entire beet crop.

I have a new planting of beets coming along, so I'm going to have to come up with a different solution.

Happy gardening!