Dealing With Bunnies

I used to think that bunnies were cute. What normal person doesn't? They are small, furry, cuddly (looking), and they hop. Cute, right? Well... I started growing vegetables, and I changed my mind about the whole cute business.

We have a six foot tall board-on-board fence all around the backyard for our two dogs, so I didn't think we had to worry about any wild animals trespassing on our yard (did I mention that I'm a city girl, generally unfamiliar with the digging abilities of small animals?). We also put up a plastic fence around the garden area to keep the dogs out, so I thought the garden crops were fairly well protected. But it wasn't long before the damages started. First the lettuce and spinach got chewed up. Then the pea seedlings disappeared overnight. The bean seedlings also suffered. It was driving me crazy!

Then Keith emailed me this picture one day:


It (and all its family/friends) chewed through the plastic fence, after wiggling its way under the outside fence! Having no sympathy for the bunny (as cute as it was) that had been chewing on my babies (vegetables), I was happy (more like overjoyed) when Keith told me that Sienna went after the bunny. Look what Sienna did for us:


Let's just say, that was not a good day for this bunny.

Unfortunately, this bunny must have come from a big family, because the damages to the crops didn't stop. They just kept getting worse. Over the course of about a month, Sienna caught four bunnies, but she wasn't a 24/7 bunny hunter, and the bunnies just kept coming back. I wanted to put up a stronger chicken-wire type of fence, but Keith had other ideas, and I ended up with this:


The right-most box suffered some damage when the box accidentally got dropped while being moved. I'm told that the boxes were verrrrrrry heavy (one of the few benefits of being a long-distance gardener is that I'm not always around to partake in the heavy lifting - literally this time - when something needs to be done). We'll have to repair it at the end of this season.

So far, the remaining crops that survived the initial bunny attacks are doing okay in the elevated boxes. I just don't have as many plants left as I would like, but hopefully I can plant more fall crops.

Have you had any problems with bunnies, and how did you deal with them?

First Garden Post (How It All Started)

After spending many nights poring over different vegetable gardening blogs, I came to this conclusion that I wanted a blog of my own to chronicle my gardening progress this year.

I have been a city girl all my life and never learned to garden before. Some people grow up with gardening parents, grandparents, or even relatives who live out in the "country" (where they surely garden) whom they visit every summer. Not me. I spent my whole life living in apartments or houses with tiny backyards in urban settings. The closest I ever got to vegetable gardening was going to the local farmer's market (I know, not really the same thing). So I really had zero exposure to actual gardening.

Then sometime last year, I got this idea in my head that I wanted to try growing my own herbs (training-vegetables?), and mentioned it to my boyfriend.  Keith, being the good man that he is, totally surprised me with my first herb growing setup for my birthday.  I didn't really know what I was doing with watering, transplanting and growing, but some of the herbs actually survived and became edible. Now I was inspired, and ready to move on to "real" vegetables.

This year, I found out about square foot gardening while researching backyard vegetable gardening. So we (and by we, I mean Keith) built three 4' x 4' boxes and set out about planting.

Three Square Foot Gardening beds on May 2, 2010

With great newbie enthusiasm, I quickly planted lettuce, spinach, onions, carrots, peas, green beans, squash, cucumbers, and a few others. As I continued my research about vegetable gardening, though, it wasn't long before I realized that planning should actually take longer than planting. I learned that lettuce, spinach, and peas like cool weather, but OH NO, I already planted them and the hot summer was fast approaching. Wait, just how big does a squash plant get? And onions, what's this about about long and short day sets? Ack.

Then came the bunnies.