What Do Possums Eat in the Garden – Diet and Pest Control

If you have ever caught a slow, gray, cat-sized critter shuffling across your yard after dark and wondered what do possums eat, the short answer is almost anything. The North American opossum (Didelphis virginiana) is the continent’s only marsupial and one of its most flexible eaters, and that flexible appetite is exactly why it turns up in vegetable beds, under fruit trees, and around the compost pile. The good news for gardeners is that most of what a possum eats is the stuff you already want gone: slugs, snails, beetles, cockroaches, mice, and rats. Understanding their full menu tells you whether the visitor in your garden is a friend, a foe, or simply a tidy houseguest passing through.

Opossums Are Omnivores That Eat Almost Anything

Opossums are opportunistic omnivores, which means they eat both animal and plant matter and rarely turn down a free meal. Most of their diet is animal protein, especially insects and other small creatures, but they round it out with fruit, nuts, and whatever else they can scavenge. Their poor eyesight is offset by a sharp sense of smell and good hearing, and they forage almost constantly through the night, covering ground in search of anything edible.

A single backyard menu can include:

• Insects and invertebrates: beetles, grasshoppers, crickets, cockroaches, snails, and slugs
• Small animals: mice, rats, frogs, lizards, and the occasional snake
• Carrion: roadkill and other dead animals, which they pick clean
• Fruit and nuts: fallen, overripe, or rotting fruit, persimmons, grapes, berries, and acorns
• Garden produce: sweet corn, soft tomatoes, and other very ripe vegetables
• Human-adjacent food: pet food left outdoors, birdseed, compost scraps, and garbage

One quirk worth knowing is that opossums need a lot of calcium, which is part of why they readily gnaw on the bones and skeletal remains of rodents and roadkill. They are also remarkably good at remembering where food is. In laboratory tests of food-location memory, opossums outperformed rats, rabbits, cats, and dogs, which is bad news once one discovers your garbage cans or pet bowls, because it will keep coming back to the same reliable source.

Possums Eat the Garden Pests You Want Gone

This is where opossums earn their keep. As they patrol your yard at night, they hoover up many of the pests that plague gardeners. Slugs and snails, which shred hostas and seedlings, are fair game. So are beetles, grasshoppers, and crickets that chew foliage, plus cockroaches and the mice and rats that raid sheds and seed storage. Because opossums are immune to most snake venom, even a rattlesnake is just another meal to them, so they help keep snake numbers down too.

They also play a quiet role in cleanup. By eating carrion, opossums remove decaying animals from the landscape before they spread odor or disease, which is why they are often called nature’s cleanup crew. For a vegetable garden, that combination of pest control and sanitation usually outweighs the small amount of produce they nibble.

The Truth About Possums and Ticks

You have probably seen the viral claim that a single opossum eats thousands of ticks per season, with figures like 4,000 or 5,000 often quoted. It is worth being honest here, because the science behind that number is shakier than the memes suggest.

The famous figure traces back to a 2009 laboratory study. Researchers attached ticks to captive opossums, then counted how many ticks remained afterward and assumed the missing ones had been eaten during grooming. From the animals’ high removal rate, they extrapolated the eye-catching seasonal total. That estimate spread fast and turned the opossum into an unlikely public hero.

More recent fieldwork has challenged it. A 2021 peer-reviewed study examined the stomach contents of 32 wild opossums and found no ticks or tick parts at all, and a review of more than twenty earlier diet studies likewise found ticks were not a recorded part of the opossum’s natural diet. In other words, opossums do not appear to seek out ticks as food.

So what is true? Opossums are meticulous self-groomers, and during that constant cleaning they kill and remove an estimated 90 to 95 percent of the ticks that climb onto them, whether they swallow them or simply crush and discard them. They also resist carrying Lyme disease, so they make poor reservoirs and tend to reduce the number of infected ticks in an area rather than spread them. The bottom line: opossums very likely help limit ticks in your yard, but through grooming and disease resistance rather than by gorging on thousands of them. Treat the big tick-eating number as folklore, not fact.

How a Possum’s Diet Shifts With the Seasons

Because they eat what is available, an opossum’s diet changes through the year, and that explains when you are most likely to see one in the garden.

• Spring: Coming off lean winter months, opossums chase protein to rebuild weight, hunting insects and small animals and grazing on tender new growth and the first fruits.
• Summer: Insects are everywhere, so bugs, slugs, and snails dominate, supplemented by ripening berries and fruit.
• Fall: This is the fattening season. Opossums load up on calorie-dense nuts, seeds, acorns, and fallen fruit to build reserves before the cold.
• Winter: With insects scarce and hunting harder, they lean on scavenging and small mammals, and they are far more likely to visit yards, trash, and pet bowls when natural food runs short.

If a possum suddenly appears around your house in late autumn or winter, this seasonal shift, combined with an easy food source you may be leaving out, is usually the reason.

Garden Friend or Foe? Mostly a Friend

Weighing the whole diet, the opossum lands firmly on the helpful side of the ledger for most gardeners. They eat large numbers of pests, clean up carrion, and cause only minor, occasional damage to crops. When they do raid produce, they overwhelmingly prefer fruit and vegetables that are already overripe or beginning to rot, so they tend to clean up your garden rather than clean it out. A possum will usually take a windfall apple softening on the ground long before it climbs for sound fruit on the branch.

A few reassuring points work in their favor:

• They rarely carry rabies. An opossum’s naturally low body temperature makes it a poor host for the rabies virus, so the risk from these animals is very low compared with raccoons, skunks, or foxes.
• They are not aggressive. When frightened they bluff, hiss, or famously “play possum” by going limp, and they will almost always flee rather than fight.
• They do not stay long. Adults are solitary, nocturnal, and nomadic, so a possum that finds nothing rewarding usually moves on within a few nights.

There is one thing opossums notably do not do, which sets them apart from other nighttime visitors: they do not dig up your lawn or root through beds the way raccoons and skunks do when hunting grubs. If you wake to a torn-up lawn or cone-shaped holes in the turf, the culprit is almost certainly a raccoon, skunk, or armadillo rather than a possum. Opossums forage at the surface and on fallen food, so widespread digging damage points elsewhere.

What Attracts Possums to Your Yard

Possums show up where food is easy, so almost everything that draws them is something you can control. The most common attractants are:

• Pet food and water bowls left outside overnight
• Open or loosely lidded trash cans and unsecured compost
• Birdseed and spilled sunflower seeds under feeders
• Fallen, overripe fruit rotting beneath trees and vines
• Accessible vegetable beds with very ripe corn, tomatoes, or soft produce
• Dark, undisturbed shelter such as gaps under decks, sheds, and porches

Remove the buffet and the easy bedroom, and most opossums simply wander off to a better spot.

How to Humanely Discourage a Possum

Because opossums do far more good than harm, the goal is gentle discouragement, not war. Start with the food and shelter that pull them in:

• Secure the trash and compost. Use bins with tight, lockable lids and keep compost in a closed system rather than an open pile.
• Take in pet food and water. Feed pets indoors, or pick up bowls before dusk, since outdoor pet food is one of the biggest draws.
• Clean up windfalls. Rake up fallen, rotting fruit and nuts promptly and harvest ripe vegetables before they oversoften.
• Move or guard birdseed. Sweep up spilled seed and consider pausing feeders if a possum keeps returning.
• Use fencing. A smooth fence at least four feet tall, ideally with the top angled outward or topped with a wobbly wire that will not bear weight, discourages climbing into specific beds. Be aware opossums are capable climbers, so a low or rough fence alone may not be enough.
• Close off shelter. Block gaps under decks, sheds, and crawl spaces with wire mesh, but only after confirming no animal, especially a mother with young, is inside.

Gentle sensory deterrents can help too. Motion-activated lights or sprinklers startle a nocturnal animal, and some gardeners report success with strong scents near specific plants. Avoid mothballs and other toxic repellents, which are dangerous to pets, wildlife, and people. There is rarely any need to trap an opossum, and in many places relocating wildlife is regulated or illegal, so check local rules before considering it.

Baby Possums and Why Not to Feed Wildlife

Opossums are marsupials, and their babies are born honeybee-sized and crawl into the mother’s pouch, where they nurse for roughly two to three months before they are big enough to forage on their own. As they grow, the young ride on the mother’s back, which is why you sometimes see one adult trailing several small passengers across the yard. Baby opossums depend entirely on their mother’s milk early on and only begin eating the solid, omnivorous diet of adults once they reach a couple of months old.

Tempting as it is to leave out food for a visiting possum or a litter, resist it. Feeding wild opossums makes them dependent, dulls their natural foraging, and draws them and other wildlife repeatedly toward your home, which raises the odds of conflict. Many human foods, including chocolate, caffeine, onions, and heavily processed scraps, are also harmful to them. Opossums are superbly equipped to find their own meals, and the kindest thing a gardener can do is let them do exactly that while quietly enjoying the free pest control they provide.