Okay, polling the audience, I grew up with a granddad that loved to garden, fed the family and half the neighbors families.

However though I've worked with raccoons for years including radio tracking on projects and a variety of disease projects
I have never had a garden and raccoons in the same spot.

The calls I get are typically, "I'm concerned for my kids or my dog or cats," or "I've got raccoons in my attic, chimney, etc...."

Was asked today if they will reduce a garden to nothingness and I realized though I know they are omnivorous there never
seems to be much discussion here or elsewhere about raccoons being a major home vegetable gardeners threat.

So, to the crowd I ask what say you? In terms of garden thieves how do raccoons rate in your area?

This would be really geared toward urban suburban raccoon populations in this scenario.

Thanks,

Justin

Oh and if so, specifically what vegetables are they laying waste to? I can picture corn from many states and ag field situations through
the years... What else?

Sweat corn

Not much damage to my garden from coons where I live and I have plenty of raccoons. I get way more damage from rabbits, insects, and birds.

I don't have sweet corn planted though.

Always have a garden with lots of coons in the area. They seem to know about 1 day before sweet corn is ready to pick. That is the only thing I know of that coons bother.

Last year, coons wiped out just about every backyard sweet corn plot in the county. Pretty sure Tractor Supply and Rural King set records for cage trap sales for one week.

Raccoons and I have the same opinion on food; "If it's good for you, don't eat it!" I trailed a raccoon that had come down through

the fireplace in a pretty expense house. He helped himself to as much candy as he could find, opening candy dishes and leaving

wrappers lying everywhere. I swear this is true: Tonight we had a phone call from an extremely old lady. See said she was going to

call the police because we aren't very much help. Our technicians threw marshmallows in the cage with something on them. What the

heck did we expect to catch with that? Man, I love this job. They supply the humor and pay us besides.

Coons target sweet corn and poultry for the urban gardener. While I'm sure they will eat tomatoes, figs, apples and other fruits I've never seen them target those like they do corn.
In most urban areas backyard gardens are 10'x10' and corn of any type is not grown.

X2

And I've had a garden for almost 30 years, and plenty of raccoons around

If possible, the farmers in our area hide the sweet corn in the middle of the field corn. I've never asked exactly how that worked.

Does the field corn help disguise the smell or do the raccoons eat so much field corn that by the time they get to the sweet corn

they're full? I do know that I can tell when the sweet corn is getting ripe. You'll see the farmer driving down the road with a wagon

load of the cheapest raccoon traps money can buy. I often wonder what he uses for bait to protect an entire field of goodies?

Done several where they are stealing all the ripe strawberries.

They are hard on grapes too.

Berries of all sorts, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, etc.

I don't know if they like other melons but they sure like ripe cantaloupes.

They like fruit such as apples and peaches but I haven't heard of them causing problems with them.

While raccoons are omnivorous, I think fruit and vegetables take a distant second to meat and fish in their diet.

Thanks folks, just the kind of confirmation I was looking for.

sgs- your last sentence is pretty much what I said to her verbatim.

Our gardening gets more and more intense every year, but (knock wood) never had a problem with coons. We have 'maters, broccoli, strawbs and a coupla other things I pay no attention to (if it were up to me, I'd have a quarter acre in tomatoes; won't bother cultivating anything else). Biggest problems are with box turtles and bunnies. I think that if a live raccoon entered our yard that wasn't in a trap, Tonto (the Bluetick Coonhound) would go irretrievably insane and Lucy (Beagle) would bawl for hours.
I take that back; we had a sick coon in the backyard over the winter, and Tonto only lost his sanity for a month or two.