Early July Update: The Rabbit Wars Continue

 

As you can see, the pinwheels are a great rabbit deterrent. *eye roll*

The area he's lounging behind is the former pea area, nibbled down to stubs and then taken over by weeds. Behind him are transplanted ground cherry plants (that were volunteers randomly growing in other parts of the garden. Gotta love free plants - especially free plants that produce yummy fruit!). Rabbits don't like ground cherries, so those are safe.

I need to replant the weedy pea area with more stuff. I picked up cheap bean, carrot, lettuce and a few other seeds (including catnip!) at Target and Wal-Mart yesterday, and plan to build one of these over the new seedlings:

I don't have a raised bed in that spot, but I think just putting it on the ground over the veggies should work. There are easy instructions in The All New Square Foot Gardening  (awesome book!), and we have lots of extra chicken wire, because I finally gave in and bought some to fence in the beans.

I went out one morning shortly after the peas were eaten to find bites taken out of a few of the bean plants and ran right out to the hardware store. So much for being fence free! But it's working! The beans have been completely untouched since then. Woot.

And they're starting to climb!

runner beans running

The tomato plants are getting bigger by the day too.

And we have tomatoage!

Better Boy

Sungold

The cabbages and onions look happy:

Cabbages

Onions

I'm trying melon for the first time this year. Lots of flowers, but no fruit yet!

Pumpkin, Melon and more Pumpkin

Melon Flowers

To keep the rabbits away, I cover the melon plants with netting every night. I use the rocks to hold down the netting!

pumpkins-to-be

The pumpkins are coming along too. You can already see baby pumpkins-to-be getting ready to flower.

The purple carrots I planted are doing really well - maybe in part to my crazy thrown together rabbit blocker made out of netting and sticks. I think the mint surrounding them might also help confuse the bunnies.

carrots and mint

Some of them are starting to poke out of the ground!

By the way, a mint leaf chewed with a stevia leaf (forgot to take a pic of the stevia plant) tastes great and is a wonderful breath freshener!

Finally, we have the zucchini/cucumber bed.  It was just going to be zucchini, but there seemed to be a lot of space in two corners, so I  went ahead and planted cucumbers there (from seed), a little later than they normally would have gone in. I've had crazy bad luck with cukes the last few years. Either they don't germinate, the plants turn yellow and wither, or the rabbits get them. These are a variety developed especially for container gardens, called "patio snacker". I was planning on putting them in a pot on the deck... but a raised bed is a lot like a container, and so far so good!

The arugula on the outside of the bed is still going strong too!

happy baby cuke plants

I need to go get more netting before the rabbits find these!

One final note on the rabbits:  I have a theory on why we have so many all of a sudden. Our dog passed away this year.  I'm thinking she was probably (unbeknownst to us until now) the best rabbit deterrent in the world. When I first started the garden we had no rabbits. Back then the dog was young, healthy, loud and fast. These past few years as she got older, slower and quieter, we had our first rabbit visits. Now that she's completely gone they've taken over.  And not only do we have rabbits, for the first time ever we also have chipmunks. LOTS of them. They've always been in the area, but never in our yard. Now they happily frolic, chase and chirp to each other while I'm out puttering in the garden. So cute!

Gotta love a chipmunk

We're planning on getting a new dog (puppy or young adult) in August... so I'm hopeful that he or she will clear out the rabbits but that the chipmunks decide to stick around!