Possums: Garden Good or Bad?

Jim Bliss, My Seasonal Lawn, picture

Many of us who live in the mountains have probably never run across a live opossum. They are nocturnal, live in trees and are very shy of people. My dog, however, changed that for me. Well before dawn one morning, I awoke to a frenzy of barking and loud thumps. I shuffled my pajama-clad way along my vegetable beds where my dog was throwing himself against the fence. There on the top, as still as death, was a possum. They really do play possum! After Tucker ceased his attack, the possum never twitched. This behavior is not under the possum’s control and is accompanied by a spew of foul-smelling liquid which many believe makes the animal unappetizing to predators.

What was my midnight visitor’s relationship to my squash and tomatoes…garden friend or foe? Possums are more likely to eat tomato horn worms than tomatoes off your vines. Though they are omnivores, they prefer fruit which is a little rotten, so they are more likely to help keep your garden clean than plunder your produce.

This critter, the Virginia Opossum (Didelphis virginiana) is North America’s only marsupial. The babies, born about the size of a bumble bee, make the long trek to their mother’s pouch where they are nurtured until they are large enough to ride around on mother’s back until they mature. They are found all over the country but seem to vary in size from one to three feet, being larger in the north. A truly adaptable species, there were recognizable possums around when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Possums get blamed for a lot of damage they don’t cause. If something is digging in your garden, it’s much more likely to be a raccoon. If a possum is prowling around your garden, they are probably helping. They feed on slugs, snakes (they are resistant to rattlesnake venom), rodents, insects and even toads. A possum consumes around 5000 ticks in a year. A bug that we consider scary, they consider a snack!

Harmless to us and more help than harm around the garden, what’s the problem? With their scaly prehensile tail, they look enough like a giant rat to give most people the heebie-jeebies. This shy animal is in no way related to the rat. Though a possum may hiss at you and drool a little, that is pretty much a bluff. If drooling makes you think rabies, possums are naturally resistant to rabies and almost never contract the disease.

Covering your compost and putting a tight lid on your garbage will probably prevent possum “infestations.” If they do den up under your deck or house, you may have holes to patch before something worse, like a skunk, moves in. Sprinkle flour in front of the opening and check for footprints late at night. If you see that they’ve left, block the hole so they can’t get back in.

There are obnoxious smells, like ammonia, that are supposed to drive possums away, but then they won’t eat my garden bugs. So, I just skip that part. With opossums, I live and let live; after all, I almost never see them anyway.