Kill the Wabbit…
A while back I wrote here about my excitement at seeing the return of rabbits to our little space of nature. I’d been surprised to find, when we moved out here, that both rabbits and squirrels seemed to be absent from our island of grass and trees in the agricultural sea of former prairie.
Back when I wrote that, I didn’t have a garden...
We’ve planted vegetable gardens here occasionally over our decade or so at the Homestead, the grandest effort being the straw bale garden that MLW designed and implemented a few years ago.
...In fact, looking back, the first sightings of rabbits on the periphery of the yard was later in the same summer as we put in that garden. Coincidence...?
At any rate, we hadn’t done a vegetable garden since then, but we decided to do one this spring. In our uncertain times we didn’t want to incur the expense of the straw bales, so we modified the garden plot to just use the soil underneath. This mostly involved pulling up some partially buried landscaping fabric (a hateful activity which has definitely affected the likelihood that I’ll ever use it again) and renting a rototiller. We are in prime farm country, so one can anticipate that the soil is going to be pretty good for vegetables, and this same area, more or less, also held my grandmother’s garden years ago.
We sprouted seeds indoors and then planted them - a variety of items including pole beans, peas, lettuce, spinach, carrots, beets, rutabagas, zuchinni and yellow sauash, and a variety of types of tomatoes. I enjoy much about this process - the planting, the weeding, and watching the garden grow are as much fun as the actual anticipation of the harvest for me.
When it started I did not make the connection to what was going on. Specifically, I noted that one of the pole beans seemed to have broken off. It had not been in great shape when it went into the garden, so I figured it just hadn’t made it, and set it aside in my head.
Then the one next to it was gone.
This proceeded, each trip to the garden finding less and less of what was planted still remaining - no lettuce, no spinach, and now one single, sad green onion...
I think MLW actually first suggested that it might be the rabbits. I don’t think I’d made the connection, in part because I hadn’t seen them anywhere near the garden. And, after all, the garden is right there in dog territory, so they wouldn’t dare, would they?
I say I hadn’t made the connection "in part", because the other part might just be that I’m kinda dumb. I already know they will venture into dog territory, even without a garden in there. And, after all, what else did I think was happening? I clearly wasn’t shaving with Occam’s Razor that week.
So where does that leave us? Like this:
Of course, it’s a little hard to see what isn’t there, without context, so let me offer some:
The zuchinni and yellow squash are doing great - I suspect the hairy composition of their stalks is somehow unpalatable to the leporid louts invading our space. And somehow, some of the rutabagas have made it through. There are a handful of tomatoes that have survived, but most of them are later transplants offered up by some friends, and I suspect that their larger size at the time of planting may have reduced the risk of predation.
But spinach? Slaughtered. Carrots? Killed. Peas? Pulverized. Beans? Butchered. Lettuce? Left this mortal coil. Beets? Uh... well, you get the point.
I did have this section of the garden blocked off to keep the dogs out, worried they would walk on the sprouts. In retrospect, that was almost certainly a mistake. The space between the climbing wires is too small for our dogs to walk through, but for rabbits...? What I appeared to have offered, instead, was a rabbit smorgasbord in a canine-free safe zone.
I am quite honestly now wondering if the absence of rabbits from our property was more than just happenstance. My grandparents were children of the depression, and their gardening was more than just a hobby. Grandma Marie even picked dandelions for salad (the yard offers an abundant supply), and I’m certain that was even more true for prior generations at the homestead. Our ancestors did not have the same perspective towards maintaining a natural balance of critters - I can easily picture ancestors engaging in an active rabbit extermination program to protect their gardens.
But I am not going to do that - mass scale lepooridicide is off the table.
However, it’s clear that if we are going to continue to grow vegetables going forward I will probably need to put a rabbit-proof fence around our garden. This is the sort of chore that I don’t love because, while I understand how to do it intellectually, my technical skills are... lacking. No matter how hard I try the fence will almost certainly look like crap when I’m done.
But our garden looks like crap now, so...