The Bunnies Are Winning
For some reason beyond my understanding, this has been a
banner year for bunnies around our house. Almost every day I see several of the
little fur balls hopping around, seemingly oblivious to my presence. They go
from one of my gardens to another to munch on my flowers, only scampering away
if I make a threatening move at a distance of less than a few paces. Somehow,
they seem to know I am no threat as they happily make mincemeat out of my
plants while they keep a wary eye out for more serious predators.
We replanted some of our flower beds with specific flowers
to prevent a bunny invasion. Conventional wisdom from gardeners has been that
marigolds will prevent rabbits from entering a garden because the flowers
stink. So, we planted a row of marigolds along one of our beds to foil the
little nibblers. One day after planting them, one of our resident critters
lopped off the bloom of every marigold in the row. Every one! It might have
been a deer, but I am guessing rabbit since I see them every day and they know
the lay of my land and they lay in wait for each time I plant something new.
One of the little buggers must be a momma because my
population of the hoppers includes several babies bouncing around. Mother
Nature protects these by making them too cute. I’m guessing that this is a year
of few resident foxes or bobcats in our neighborhood, allowing the hungry rabbits
to thrive. Maybe they are thriving because they also eat the cracked corn that
I put out for birds. (Now that I mention it, I seem to recall an intense
competition under the bird feeder between bunnies and chipmunks.)
Not only do the bunnies eat flowers, they love my tender
vegetable plants even more. I have several raised beds for veggies, and I made
the terrible mistake of not fencing all of them. My previous experience was
that the long-eared critters only like certain plants. This year it has become apparent that my
previous experience was faulty, the devils seem to like almost everything,
especially the beans and peas that I was counting on but neglected to fence.
Only the tomatoes and hot peppers have survived outside the fences.
The two fenced beds are doing OK and I will have more zucchini
than we can possibly eat and more kohlrabi than anyone would want. The kale
that was also in the fenced bed was attacked by flying critters of some sort,
so I have pretty much written it off also. It was just an experiment anyway,
since I’m sure real Americans don’t eat anything that
begins with the letter K.
So, it will be another year where my expenditures for seeds
will exceed my savings in growing my own vegetables. But so what, at least, the
bunnies are happy. And besides, they are just so durn cute!
