get a cheap game camera and put it up. It will catch whatever it is and then you can plan accordingly. I've had to do that before for something messing with my potted plants on the front porch. Ended up being a possum and a cat. Possum looking for bugs. Cat just being a pain in the butt cat wanting to lay where I don't want it.

When i lived in md we had a vegetable area. We used electric goat mesh.. it looks like chicken wire just taller worked so good the zucchini and squash jumped the fence and took over an acre of pasture. It was just good the horses like the squash. Had a similar issue with strawberries where the escaped thier enclosure. And then it got infested with spiders so i ran it over with the bush hog.

For most critters an electric fence is the way to go. Just be aware it's useless on birds and the fence line has to be perfect or it will short. Some of the better ones can contend with grass touching.

I have an electric fence designed to keep bears out of my beehives which I made large enough to contain the whole garden. Unfortunately, it was not designed properly for bunnies and I think deer ate hopping over. Sigh. Shop now I have to add about 5 wires along the bottom 2" apart and and something additional at the top.

Let me tell you...I have infinite respect for farmers!!!!!

I used to run a big farm. My family bred racehorses before my grandpas alzheimers got to bad. I was so glad we didnt run the crop side aside from the few spots we grew veggies. The crop side is just way too much work.

About 2 years ago i ran a baler in exchange for a year of hay. Most boring job ever.

Its a very bad year for farmers here between the weather and the immigration issues. Kinda a trickle effect that will effect the cattle industry prices and coors beer prices and crappy powdered potato prices. I seriously dont see how they manage

We have always been cattle farmers but not a CAFO size cattle farm. The farm covers itself and we have other outside careers to cover other things. A lot of farmers now are corporate backed and if the crop doesn't make it then it doesn't hurt them, it hurts the corporation they work for. Few farmers (larger scale anyway) own their farms anymore and have to take a serious loss in bad years. It's the smaller farms that get the shaft. Haying started here last weekend. Going to have another wet round coming. Always interesting to see how many hay sheds burn down on wet years because someone new to the industry or a little antsy moves their hay in too early. We used to do market scale gardening when I was much younger. It was more for survival than for market though. My grandma taught us depression era gardening so we grew tons and then did big canning parties to preserve much of it for winter. We've scaled down since she died because it's hard to get time to do that much canning. I usually put up 10 gallons of tomatoes for winter. A couple gallons of beans.

We were a bit more barbaric in our protective practices. Rabbit wire all around the garden with a cayenne pepper/tobasco sauce mixture sprayed on the plants, then the blood of a rabbit or other small critter dripped around the perimeter. That did a lot for the animals. Neem oil for the bugs.

Depression era farming is why we ended up with so much squash and stuff. Then my grandpa had this genius idea to have me go to the farmers market with it and somehow manage the farm. Just agreed went to the farmers market and gave it away. Im not all about the people skills for that.

Cows are so much fun to chase with a horse... even with a thoroughbred and an english saddle. The guy that grew the hay paid me during hay season to help bale. Helped with hay costs since we bought 60% of the total hay. He also used to pay me to take the 4h kids to count cows.

Here coors corporate contracts alot. Same with McDonald's on potatoes. The whole economy here is livestock potatoes hops barley and hay. They arnt corporate farms they contracted by corporations. But most of the mom and pop operations are one by one being bought up by mega ranches. And now hemp it the new gold rush but give it 10 years and a handful of businesses will own the entire industry. But here what really really matters is water rights because of the alpine desert and that was 1 thing that made the house i bought special... it came with an irrigation well with a permit for 300 acres per day and shares of the irrigation ditch. Not that im going to farm my 1 acre property but i have the ability to sell the water.. and that alone is worth more then my house

I'm glad we don't have water issues here, or strange riparian rights to have to contend with. I can keep as many rain barrels as I want and dam the creek that runs through our property if I want. Just can't redirect the creek so that it floods someone else out. lol. I don't believe it is a full-time creek. Curious what its output will be once we get moved. So much brush around it all we could see of it was the starting weep.

This used to be my dining room