This morning at 5:00am I was out in the garden, dressed only in a bathrobe, wielding a large stick and for half an hour I chased a rabbit with murder in my heart!
The little B*##~% got away!
It all started when we moved to a new house out in the country. There was a lot to do in the house but outside - the garden could only be described as a disaster area. It was a wilderness of weeds, grass, stone, wire a ramshackle shed/greenhouse and a mound of bricks. There were rabbits everywhere.
I suppose that's what comes of living on a hill between a derelict railway line(at the left of the picture) and a main road (on the right) with a forest on the other side of the rail bed. The soil contains a lot of ash from the steam trains which used to run here and in the trees surrounding us on both sides there are rabbit warrens.
At first we thought they were cute. They had been undisturbed for a while and didn't seem too concerned by our presence. They just kept about 10 yards away and kept on nibbling. When we came home in the car there were usually four or five running along the drive (the old rail bed) in front of us.
For a while they didn't annoy us. We were too busy working on fixing up the house inside to bother with the garden. It was April - warm and wet this year - the grass was growing fast but I didn't have to mow the lawn, the rabbits did that for us. Eventually we just had to do something about that garden. It was obvious that with so many rabbits around vegetables were out of the question so we mowed the lawn, used some of the bricks to make a path and planted a few flowers. The flowers were promptly eaten.
"Oh well" we thought, "once we can let the cats out they'll chase the rabbits off and we can just plant stuff the rabbits won't eat for now." A little research on Internet soon told us however that rabbits are a gardeners WORST enemy but that they wouldn't eat daffodils, forget-me-nots or roses. Daffodils and forget-me-nots abounded in the garden already so we bought some roses and planted those. By morning there were just the stems left. Rabbits WILL eat roses!
"Oh there are lots of things they won't eat" said a guy in our local garden centre. "Its just that no one is quite sure just what they don't like. We have chicken wire that keeps them out though."
"They won't eat marigolds" said a customer at the checkout. We bought chicken wire, marigolds and some begonias which we thought we could protect.
Back home we planted the marigolds and started work on surrounding the garden with a 'rabbit proof' fence. It was obvious that this would take some time so we built a cage with some old wire we found to surround the begonias. The next morning we discovered that rabbits do not like marigolds - in fact they hate them so much they bite the flowers off and drop them so that they don't produce seed and spread further.
I used more of the bricks to build a section of wall on the side next to the road and used corrugated iron sheets too. On the railway line side we repaired the fence already there and used more bricks dug down into the ground to stop the rabbits digging under it. Next to the house and at the far end of the garden we completed a new fence and two gates across the paths. "That should do it." we thought after we blocked up the rabbit holes with bricks and finally let our two cats loose.
It was at this point that we discovered that rabbits can get through 50mm chicken wire!Three of them got in; one escaped through the wire and two were caught alive when they chose to hide behind our garden table stacked on edge at the side of the fence. We used our cat box as a cage for them and started experimenting to see just what they would eat.
We bought 20mm rabbit wire, split the rolls down the middle and put it on top of our existing fence near the ground to keep out those young ones which could get through the 50mm wire. We reasoned that we didn't need the full height wire since the little ones couldn't reach the 50mm section at the top and the bigger ones which could would be too big to get through it. This time we thought we had done it.
Next morning the garden was still full of rabbits which disappeared under the garden shed when we chased them. They had dug a tunnel under it from the warren by the side of the road. I surrounded the shed base with a brick wall sealing them off.
Next morning at 5:00am our son woke me up to tell me there was squealing downstairs. It turned out that one of our cats had caught a rabbit and brought it into the house to play with. It was still alive but only just. I cleaned up the blood from the living room carpet and gave it the coupe de grasse.
The rabbit population started to drop. Our cats killed at least three that we know of, a family of weasels moved into our neighbourhood and a fox can be heard barking at night (much to the annoyance of the local gamekeeper who is rearing pheasants in our wood).
For a few days we thought we had them beaten. The grass on our lawn started to grow and dandelions started to appear. It seems dandelions are a rabbit favourite. Our experiments with the ones we captured seemed to show that they will eat just about anything if they are hungry enough unless the plant is poisonous e.g. foxgloves. Some plants they obviously don't like but will nibble at and drop. Some plants - like marigolds, they won't eat but do their best to destroy. We found a booklet 'Gardening With The Enemy' by Janet Thompson which was some help which has a list of rabbit resistant plants. It's list isn't perfect though since we found some plants they rate as 'rabbit safe' get eaten by ours and others they bite and spit out. We felt confident enough to buy over a hundred pounds worth of plants and plant out the sweet peas we knew they love above all other plants.
And that brings me to this morning when I got up to go to the bathroom and looked out of the window to see a rabbit eating the sweet peas ...aaaggghhh! The worst of it is that I can't find where it got in and it couldn't get out easily until it escaped over the remains of the brick pile.
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9 comments:
Well once it had stopped raining I found out how they were getting in. In the past someone had cut down two trees just on the other side of the fence. They were using the stumps as stepping stones to reach the top of the fence and then jumping over. I've fixed that by adding another 3 feet of wire at that point.
Well after a month of successfully keeping them out, we've again had rabbits in our garden. Fortunately they didn't do too much damage this time. This time they got in by tunnelling from the warren between our garden and the road. Apparently they CAN dig below the two feet of wire buried in the ground! Investigating with a steel rod I've found a network of tunnels about three feet down. This time I collapsed their burrows then dug out and filled the area with stones putting the soil back on top of them. Above that I'll lay a concrete slab path.
Well here we are in a new growing season and our war is still being fought. A new culprit has been found. It seems our cats like to play with them. They catch a baby rabbit and leap the fence into the garden with it. Often they bring it into the house to play with (Note to Adam's science teacher - Yes, one of our cats really did use his science book to slaughter a rabbit on.) Sometimes they lose interest though and leave the rabbit to feast in our garden. Maybe they plan on fattening it up?
I found this all a really great read. I was trying to find out how to keep rabits out of my garden. I thought they wouldn't get nto it but they did, as I saw my brocoli plant muched up...aaww well. At war it is.
Thanks for posting this up.
This seems really annoying. You can solve your rabbit problem with DeFence. We tried a bunch before finding this one. It’s more powerful than the other brands. And lasts a long time. Only need to apply it every 3 months.
Here's the spray I'm referring to:
http://www.havahart.com/store/animal-repellents/5600
Another year later and still we battle. They tunnelled in under the fence by the railway line during the winter and attacked the garden again. This time they went for the bark at the base of the sweet gum tree my wife planted. Maybe rabbits like chewing gum? Fortunately it survived as these trees are hard to come by in the UK. I blocked the entrance hole on the railway side but found them in the garden again later. Obviously they were living in that tunnel and I had blocked them in. I unblocked the hole and lit some straw which I pushed in the hole at the garden side. About 30 seconds later four coughing rabbits made a rapid exit at the railway line side. Gas warfare works!
Another year goes by and there are more rabbits than ever. I've seen a couple which seem to have the disease myxomatosis but the great majority are as healthy and active as ever.
The problem now is the holes they keep digging outside my garden fence. We have to be careful getting into the car since they burrow just below the surface at the side of the drive. Walk over the grass there and you suddenly find the ground giving way as your foot breaks into a tunnel. I push the excavated earth back but there never seems enough to fill the holes they make.
Hi we have exactly the same problems and have spent hundreds of pounds on different plants (including spikey roses) but they still eat them - the only ones they dont touch are geraniums. We have had people here with dogs, guns trying to get rid (as we have to have our place looking nice as they are holiday cottages), all to no avail so we just use geraniums full stop! All the best in your war, my husband says it is a constant battle against nature here.
OK - I surrender and plan on selling the lawnmower. The rabbits have won.
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