For the last several years some critter (insect or rodent) has been attacking my homegrown salvia plants about a week or two after they are in the ground. It doesn’t matter if they are a tall or short variety. It’s exasperating because I never catch anyone in the act, and when I dig around the soil I also never find any insects (like a cutworm).
Usually the plant is snapped off at the base at a point where it cannot generate new leaves and I’m left with a gaping hole in the flowerbed.
I planted some again this year but made sure I only put a maximum of two together so if they suffered the same fate, they wouldn’t leave that annoying gap.
So far I’ve lost 4 plants and again, all were snapped off at the base and can’t be salvaged.
Over the weekend I was weeding, and I discovered a salvia that had been knocked sideways, but it was still intact. Knowing its eventual fate, I replaced it with a short marigold from my emergency replacement stash that I keep for a few weeks after I plant everything.
But because that salvia wasn’t a goner yet, I relocated it to a raised bed to see what would happen. The next morning I noticed all the leaves had been chewed off and abandoned. There’s no way an insect pest would find the relocated plant so quickly, so my new theory is that chipmunks have been creating all the damage. All my salvias are growing safely behind deer fencing right now which keeps out squirrels and rabbits, but the chipmunks still figure a way to sneak through.
Next year if I decide to continue planting salvias I may have to put some additional fencing around them and see if that does the trick.