A Tomato Disaster. And Revenge.

I was cruising toward the end of a really good week. Dakota was dancing, the sun was shining, there were catkins on the aspens, and I had a pretty good start, I thought, on Tomato Season, with a bunch of little two-inch tall seedlings under the grow lights downstairs.

Actually, I had been puzzling a bit about the tomatoes. I had started about 8 dozen seeds two weeks ago, but only about three dozen were strutting their stuff, a pretty poor turnout after a couple weeks of watering and soft talk to them as I visited each morning.

Then, yesterday morning, as I opened the door to the plant room, I glanced over at the growing shelf under the bright lights, atop the warm electric blankets, and the seedlings were almost ALL gone. All but nine. My heart sank. What could have happened?

At first I told Lillian I thought there must have been something in the air overnight that killed them. She, who knows more about plants and gardens than anyone I know except Linda Suchy, was skeptical.

I stood back from the plant shelf and studied, then moved back up close, and that’s when I noticed the tiny little green stubs sticking out of the pellets they had been growing from. That’s when it hit me. Something had chewed them off.

Mice.

We’re a little prone to mice this time of the year. They get active, find their way in through cracks in our old foundation, often roaming around the basement. Lillian sets traps, and we get one once in awhile, but they are wary little creatures. And they are also hungry.

This Spring, they found a new source of nutrition.

Now, I’ve been starting tomato plants in the basement for all the 16 Springs we’ve lived here, but the mice have never found their way up to the top shelf in the warmest room in the house, the basement furnace room, where the grow lights are strategically placed over the top shelf, and where I’ve literally started at least a thousand tomato plants, resulting in hundreds of BLT’s and Bloody Mary’s, and many, many suppers of pasta with Lillian’s Marinara sauce.

Until this Spring.

Dang!

Well, it was the disaster on Friday night, March 28, 2025, that finally helped me figure out what was going on this Spring. See, I’ve had pretty good luck with starting tomatoes down there. I often start up to a hundred little peat pellets with half a dozen or more varieties of seeds I get from a California company called Tomatofest, the best seeds in America, I think. Every year they ALL sprout, and I raise them up to transplant size, putting around 25 or 30 in the ground in my garden and giving the rest away to friends who like tomatoes.

This year, about two weeks after I planted them, I had only 35 sprouts downstairs, and I couldn’t figure out what happened to the other 60. Turns out I hadn’t been paying attention. When you have 96 little pellets with seeds sprouting, it’s hard to keep track of which ones are growing. I just kept assuming that only 35 had actually sprouted. Wrong. The mice had been eating them as they sprouted, but not all of them at once, so when they chewed one off, another took its place, and I didn’t notice. Until Friday night, when they all but wiped me out, and Saturday morning, when I noticed. I was down to nine sprouts.

Double Dang!

Well, that wouldn’t do. I couldn’t serve the “Boys in the Boat” Mr. and Mrs. T Bloody Mary Mix, and I couldn’t disappoint all the friends I had promised tomato plants to in May, and I couldn’t go without BLT’s for breakfast and lunch in August and September.

It was too late to go back and order from Tomatofest, so I did the next best thing. I went up to the great greenhouse in North Bismarck, Plant Perfect, and bought new seeds.

But I wasn’t going to make the same mistake by planting them downstairs again, so I assembled my portable greenhouses UPSTAIRS, in front of the big dining room windows, and then I started over. Now I’ve got about 75 pots and pellets strategically placed for afternoon sun, along with the nine mouse survivors.

We’ll see how all this turns out. I’m just two weeks behind schedule now—like I do every year, I planted on March 15, with the plan to transplant to the garden on May 15—so I’ll likely be out in the garden digging in the dirt on June 1. I’ll keep you posted.

Oh, and I did one more thing yesterday before I went to bed, exhausted from a long day of work I never expected. I went down in the basement and set a mousetrap, with a dab of peanut butter in it, up on the shelf where the tomatoes had been the night before. Just to see if those mice might come back looking for more tomatoes. Well, they did, or at least one did. But not finding any tomatoes there, he decided to settle for peanut butter.

TAKE THAT, YOU GREEDY LITTLE RODENT!