I waded through enthusiastically growing plants, checking on their progress. The amount that plants manage to grow in 30 to 40 days after the seeds and nursery babies are put into the ground never fails to impress me. Beautiful, large leaves umbrellaed over the zucchini and melons, tomato plants, once skinny and delicate looking now looked like happy, healthy, large balls of green leaves and yellow blossoms. Even the slow-to-start carrots showed up bushy and vigorous.

There were few, if any, weeds around the plants and none in the walkway since it was still so early in the summer. When my eyes spotted a row of stubbles instead of green bean plants, I came to a stop and glanced around. Along the empty row I spotted rabbit pellets. “Those darn rabbits!” I huffed angerly. “There’s so much for them to eat outside of the garden this time of the year, why do they have to come in here to eat?”

My garden building was over twenty years old. The structure was showing its age: wooden boards were rotted; a plastic panel was missing from one end, and the plastic skin that covered the whole building was full of holes. Until it was repaired, there was no way I could block the rabbits and deer from entering the garden to graze. There were several places where the hooves of a deer had punctured holes in the plastic mulch sheets. Where the rabbits munched on low-growing plants, deer nibble on taller vegetables. The peas and sunflowers didn’t survive their midnight snacks, either.

At the end of July, a work crew came to replace rotting wood support boards on the hoop building garden and swapped its leaking plastic covering with fresh material. Before they did the work, I weeded the walkway. After they left, I went to work spreading woodchips on the perimeter of the garden. The rabbits continued to visit, but since the peas, beans and sunflowers were gone, they limited themselves to just eating lower leaves.

Continue reading →