Yes, possums eat tomatoes, and they can be surprisingly persistent about it. Gardeners across the southern and central United States report possums returning night after night to feed on tomatoes at every stage of ripeness, from green to fully red. If you’re losing tomatoes overnight and can’t figure out the culprit, a possum is one of the most likely suspects.
How Possums Feed on Tomatoes
Possums are nocturnal, so the damage happens while you sleep. Their feeding style has a few quirks that gardeners notice once they start paying attention. They tend to eat one tomato at a time, sometimes returning to the same fruit over consecutive nights until it’s gone. They show a preference for tomatoes that are just turning color (blush red or yellow), but they won’t ignore green ones. Some gardeners report possums biting into unripe tomatoes and leaving them on the stem, then taking the riper ones entirely.
Tomatoes aren’t the only garden crop at risk. Possums are true omnivores, and fruit makes up a significant portion of their natural diet. A study of wild opossum diets in Oklahoma found soft fruits like berries appearing in 37% of scat samples, while plant leaves showed up in over 60%. Tomatoes, which are soft, fragrant, and easy to access on a vine, fit perfectly into the “soft fruit” category that possums gravitate toward. Lettuce, peppers, and other vegetables can also disappear once a possum finds your garden.
Is It a Possum or Something Else?
Several animals raid tomato plants at night, including raccoons, rats, and squirrels. Figuring out which one is visiting your garden matters because the solutions differ. The LSU AgCenter notes that nighttime tomato damage is most commonly caused by rats, possums, or raccoons, while squirrels tend to feed during the day.
A few clues can help you narrow it down:
- Possums leave larger, irregular bite marks and often eat only one tomato per visit. They may knock fruit off the vine or leave partially eaten green tomatoes behind. You might also find tracks with a distinctive opposable “thumb” on the hind foot.
- Raccoons are messier eaters and tend to cause more widespread damage to the plant itself, pulling vines and breaking stems. They’ll eat multiple tomatoes in one sitting.
- Rats leave small, clean bite holes, often chewing a neat opening in one side of the fruit and hollowing it out.
- Squirrels take bites during the day and often target tomatoes for their moisture content, leaving partially eaten fruit on the ground.
A trail camera pointed at your garden overnight is the simplest way to confirm the visitor. They’re inexpensive and end the guessing immediately.
How to Protect Your Tomatoes
Possums are not aggressive, but they are determined foragers. Once one discovers a reliable food source, it will keep coming back. Physical barriers are the most effective defense.
Hardware cloth or chicken wire cages around individual plants or raised beds work well because possums don’t chew through metal the way rodents do. The mesh needs to be secured at the base, since possums will push underneath loose barriers. A complete enclosure over your tomato patch, sometimes called a “crop cage,” keeps out possums along with birds, squirrels, and raccoons.
Picking tomatoes as soon as they start to show color is another practical strategy. Tomatoes ripen fine indoors on a countertop, and harvesting them at the first blush of pink means you get to them before the possum does. This approach won’t save green tomatoes from a particularly hungry visitor, but it reduces losses significantly.
Motion-activated sprinklers and lights can deter possums in the short term. Possums startle easily and will avoid a spot that surprises them. Over time, though, some individuals get used to these devices, so they work best as part of a layered approach rather than your only line of defense. Commercial repellent sprays marketed for deer or raccoons have mixed results with possums and need frequent reapplication, especially after rain.
The Tradeoff of Having Possums Around
Possums eat a lot of things you probably don’t want in your yard. They consume slugs, snails, beetles, cockroaches, and even small rodents. Their appetite for garden pests is real and well documented in diet studies. One popular claim is that possums eat thousands of ticks per season, but that turns out to be a myth. Researchers at the Illinois Natural History Survey reviewed diet analyses of over 1,280 opossums and found zero ticks in any of them. A detailed microscopic examination of 33 opossum stomachs turned up worms, insects, and even broken glass, but not a single tick.
So while possums do provide genuine pest control, the tick benefit specifically has no scientific support. The real value of a neighborhood possum is its role as a general cleanup crew: eating carrion, fallen fruit, and invertebrate pests. Whether that tradeoff is worth a few lost tomatoes depends on how serious your garden is and how many tomatoes you’re losing. For many gardeners, protecting the tomato patch with caging while letting the possum roam the rest of the yard is the best compromise.