Phil, If the tomato is ripening you can still pick it and keep it refrigerated at about 50 degrees F for a few weeks if it comes to that. It may lose some weight but it will maintain itself.
Sorry to hear that. It happened in my old patch (kicked in pumpkins) positioned 150 ft from the police headquarters and they have broken into my greenhouse in my new patch too but no plant damage, just theft.
I suggest digging a moat around the patch. Good for drainage and watering. Put up a few signs like swimming at own risk, polluted water, alligator invested water, poisonous jelly fish, electric eels, please stop dumping your sewage here, etc. Do this with pictograms as these types of guys can't read. String up some police tape, put some fish swimming upside down in there along with a skeleton arm clinging to the bank on the other side.
I found my stolen stuff back in the yard of the town's youth centre.
They grow about 70 days and are heaviest at the point when you begin to see colouring. If the nights are getting a bit cooler, you might want to cover them.
A lot of these kids have big stone when in a pack but alone they are sniveling little wimps. Karma as one of the guys mentioned is when these kids "F" with the wrong property and wrong guy and get beaten within a inch of their life. Jury's are very sympathetic to guy protecting his family.
I know what i would want to do to them,but if you have had no problems in the past with vandolism i think i would deal with the damage and try not to draw anymore attention to the patch.Threats and turning violent with some of these punks will definitely come back to haunt you.I can deal with the old man on the tractor but some of these kids have alot of misery built up.A few yrs ago a friend of mine had his Toyota truck stolen in the middle of the night.He notified police and then went looking.He caught up to 1 of the 2 punks that decided to burn his truck and phoned police.Off to court they go and the next thing you know, groups of kids are walking by his house at night threatening to burn his house down unless the charges are dropped. They will retaliate.
