Woodchuck eating tomatoes?

Hello

Here's a course of what happened in a week in our garden.

Something was eating all the tomatoes in our garden. We weren't sure what it was, so we set up some reusable rat traps in the tomato plant bed and hoped for whatever was eating them to get caught in the trap.

We were seeing many wood chucks running across our yard, and we have one little opening where a woodchuck could get in. We still haven't added a fence to this area yet because we still have to bring things in and out of this area.

Anyways. The next morning came, and we went outside to check the traps. RATS!? We live in a small town with almost no rat sightings. We have had no rat incidents what so ever. But in 2 out of 3 traps there were rats in them.

Do rats eat tomatoes? Or were they baited to the peanut butter that was in the trap?

A couple days later.

We see a woodchuck running across the garden. It proved our theory that it was the woodchuck eating the leaves of the pumpkins, the tomatoes, and some of the broccoli as well.

The next morning:
1 of the traps is missing. Some rats in the other ones, but one is obviously missing. Did the wood chuck step in it and run away with it? I guess we'll never know.

Anything we can do to keep the things away from our house? The rats already disgusted us but the woodchuck? Hope he doesn't bring some other friends to eat with him. We had a chipmunk invasion 2 years ago, we ended up shooting about 10 of the 15 there probably were. Next year, we had a problem with a deer getting its leg caught in our fence. This year, it's rats and woodchucks. Wow.

Any suggestions? Do rats eat tomatoes? Any problems with woodchucks at your garden? We had a problem a while back with them eating the lettuce, but now it's the tomatoes. Every year we're closer to finishing off the garden. We still have some work to do in terms of building walls and making fence. Thanks.

I would use the same solution on the wood chucks that you used on the chipmunks. One year, we removed 29 chipmunks. For the past 2 seasons, we've had to remove a juvenile chuck every spring. I have no tolerance for creatures who help themselves to my produce, or to my chickens. With rats, we've found that it's necessary to tie the trap down. Because, if they are not killed immediately in the trap, they will travel quite a ways with it. You may want to add some live traps and some bucket traps to your arsenal. I don't know how well the bucket traps work, but some folks say they have good results.

We've noticed the rats and woodchuck getting smarter about our traps, they close them without getting killed and help themselves to a late dinner. We've also noticed our neighbors cat trying to get into our garden, I almost wonder if leaving the gate open would be a good idea.
We're probably just gonna have to shoot the wood chuck.