Potato plunder: Winnipeg woman boiling after 80 pounds of potatoes go missing from her garden

She’s calling it a potato pilferage.

A Winnipeg woman is confused and frustrated after she said thieves peeled off with 80 pounds of potatoes from her community garden last week.

Julie Crotenko rents a full plot of land at the St. Charles Grove community garden owned by the city and noticed the missing potatoes.

“The first reaction was anger, it was like, how dare you,” Crotenko said. “And the next (reaction) was sad. How can anybody do this?”

Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "The first reaction was anger, it was like, how dare you," Crotenko said. "And the next (reaction) was sad. How can anybody do this?"

She is convinced it wasn’t animals based on the way the potatoes were dug up, with the tops carefully picked off. Crotenko said it’s the third year she’s had a garden in the area, and has never seen anything like this.

“All our hard work, all our expenses we paid to have our garden,” Crotenko said. “It is a community garden, but for people who plant, cultivate, grow and take care of it.

“It’s not a community garden where you can just come and help yourselves.”

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Crotenko posted a warning on Facebook and said others who have land in the same garden have also had incidents of theft, although not to this extent.

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Takashi Murakami gardens in the space and said the spot next to him had more than a hundred pieces of corn stolen last month. He worries about what the future holds for his plants.

“It is a bit frustrating, we put a lot of effort in and someone could have come in the middle of night and taken (them),” Murakami said. “Some people have no respect.”

Crotenko’s St. Charles garden is one of 230 allotment garden plots owned by the city in 11 different locations.

“Unauthorized picking or theft of vegetables from allotment garden plots does occur at times,” Ken Allen of the city’s Public Works Department said. “Individuals are advised to contact the police if items are being stolen from their plots.

Crotenko is not bothering to contact the police, and she said this won’t stop her from planting a garden next year, even if she has to battle another pest.

“Fighting the bugs, fighting the animals, I didn’t want to fight the two-legged creatures too.”

WATCH: Community garden hit by potato plunderer

0:58 Community garden hit by potato plunderer