Adorable Little Jerks
Everyone’s gotta eat, right? Backyard bunnies are abundant in my area, and as summer begins, they begin appearing around the garden, uninvited but clearly making themselves at home. What luck for them to have such a delicacy awaiting them at the beginning of sweet potato season – the leaves like green candy for these fiendish herbavores. First you’ll notice little bites taken out of the leaves, then entire pieces gone and plants chewed down to their stems. The culprit: BAD BUNNIES.
The damage can be catastrophic for young slips.
This one finally got accepted into the STEM academy. hahahha
RABBITCHES
Once your plants are established, the rabbits don’t really do too much damage (just a nibble here, one or two leaves there…). BUT, when you first plant your slips, they can really mess things up. For young plants, quite a delicious treat apparently, one or two leaves can mean life or death. I took my chances this year, which was a mistake. They chewed my young slips down to the stems. Adorable little jerks. I assume it’s not personal, but still.
You can’t hide from what you’ve done.
That’s right, run away! You know what you did!
So, being the super handy garden architect that I am (joke), I constructed these very fancy fences around my young plants. As the plants grew, I adjusted the fencing to compensate. I used what I had laying around – chicken wire and plastic garden fencing. Both work well but be careful because the wittle wabbits can definitely squeeze through pretty small gaps, so the grid fencing really worked best. Basically, anything you can do to block these little monsters from accessing your plants will work.
Having a cat could help keep them in line. But our dog definitely is not swift or smart enough to catch these hungry lil bunnies though. After about a month or so, your plants should be established enough to remove the barriers. During that time, I find it helpful to periodically pull the vines back in so they don’t get too tangled up in the fencing.
Doesn’t have to be fancy…
…as long as it keeps them out.
Sometimes beauty escapes its confines
Not going to win any design prizes, but does the job!
Zoom ahead a month later – everything’s okay. I still see the rabbits out there in the early morning, and at dusk, galavanting about with no regard.
Sidenote: I pulled up the mostly eaten slips – and potted them in small containers, and they came back to life after a while. Too late to replant, but I’m using a couple as houseplants now.
