A Whole Plotta Love

I admit it, I cried on Saturday. When I arrived at the plot I was met by a fleeing rabbit and I tried to follow its route of escape, but it was too quick for me. And by then the damage had already been done. Chicken wire and netting was no match for it and my beautiful, newly planted herb bed that looked like this:

Now looks like this:

All the broccoli and the parsley has been eaten. Everything else has been nibbled too, including the chives I moved from the devastated wild garlic patch.

And it wasn’t just the herb bed. The remaining broccoli seedlings waiting to be planted out have taken a massive hit. I think it’s terminal.

The Jerusalem artichokes are getting too tall for the bottle cloches now and the rabbits, happily, aren’t so keen on the older growth. They’ve still had a taste of them though.

So all that crying I did was because I had reached the end of my tether. Whatever we plant gets eaten, whenever we seal a hole the blighters chew another one overnight. To be honest, I mainly cried because a little furry mammal is smarter than me and that’s a difficult truth to digest.

So, this week the battle starts anew, and we bring new plans to the table. All planting is on hold and we’ve started clearing a little corridor in the abandoned plots around us that edge against our plot. This means the rabbits will have no ground cover and be exposed as they chew our fence. I’ve done a little bit of research and apparently rabbits aren’t so keen on this. It also allows us easier access to our fence and we need this because phase two of Keep The Zombies  Rabbits At Bay is reinforcing the barricades.

A double skin of wire is more difficult to chew through than a single skin. The idea being that the holes also become too small for the rabbits to get their snouts in (do rabbits have snouts? Muzzles? Furry little fatchops?).

It’s slow progress and we’re doing it as and when we get hold of wire. Mum and Dad L have been brilliant and are our main supply source. They’ve rallied around us in our time of need without making any references to how easily we’ve been out-maneuvered by a creature with a 5cm brain. 5cm! I mean, really…

And I’m prepared to make a deal with them to keep them away. The rabbits, that is. I’ll happily give them a small proportion of what we grow, a peppercorn rent if you will, in return for them allowing us to raise our crops unmolested. I’m just not entirely sure how to go about brokering this deal with them.