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Rabbits
sam bevington
Posts: 130
in Talkback
I'm trying to revive a once beautiful one acre country garden but my planting has been ruined by rabbits. They've gobbled £100 worth of lupins, chomped at my Gertrude Jeckyll rose, stripped a Jasmine and nick newly opened flowers that aren't close to the cottage. Can anyone recommend plants that they hate? So far they've only steered clear of my Nepeta and the nettles of course!
0
Posts
You need one of these
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Or one of these - she does rats and moles too - and a very good chain link fence buried below burrowing depth.
Or there's the old tried and trusted methods ...
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Shotgun?
Ooops - did not mean to write that
. I have used cayenne pepper this year - I think it's worked because nothing has been munched. I thought a hot nose / tongue & paws might deter them.
My smallest cat is a champion rabbiter. No bigger than a rabbit herself, she comes staggering home straddling a baby rabbit between her paws. It is nearly always dead and enthusiastically eaten by all the cats. Some years they almost feed themselves in summer, this year there have been none. The rabbits don't seem to have recovered well from the last outbreak of myxi, which always wipes them out here when numbers rise.
We seem to have three, no matter what we do it is always three! My theory is the local cats farm them! No complaints from us. I know people who do shoot them. It's not illegal, at least here it's not. We installed rabbit fencing and net all gates . Every now and then one gets into the garden and we have a "hunt"' involves a glass in ine hand and singing "run rabbit run"
A A Milne
It looks as though Charlie November and I have the same problem with rabbits! The solution ref digging/mesh won't work for my garden either!
It's a bit of a myth that dogs will control the rabbit population - my whippets are very good at catching them but - of course - the dogs aren't outdoors 24/7! There are two rabbits just outside the window beside me as I type this, even though the dogs have already done what you might call their "morning patrol". One of the dogs actually caught & killed a rabbit the other day - and the dog was on the lead at the time - when we walked down the lane.
I have found that even those plants which are supposed to be what you might call "rabbit proof" get nibbled a bit - maybe the young rabbits taste the greenery and then decide that that didn't like what they'd tried. They don't, however, seem to touch wild poppies, foxgloves, euphorbias or hellebores.
Until a few years ago I had two semi-feral cats and I've no doubt at all that they dealt with the problem far more efficiently than I could have imagined, because since the demise of the last cat, the rabbits have taken over completely.
There have been several outbreaks of myxi during the time I've lived here, but the reduction in the rabbit population then doesn't seem to have lasted. I now have a theory that those rabbits which survived the outbreaks were probably those which had a tendency to stay above ground more than the rest, so didn't come into contact much with the affected ones. I gather that the disease is spread by the transfer of infected fleas from one rabbit to another - probably down in the burrows. Years ago I never saw rabbits at all during the daytime - it was only at dawn and dusk - but the current population seems to be above ground for most of the time, so maybe they inherited this trait from earlier generations which had that inclination. The adult rabbits are also far smaller than they used to be, so again perhaps it was the smallest/weakest ones which didn't "fit in" with the rest - and became some sort of outcast, resulting in the breeding of smaller ones.
Thought I had got away with it this year
silly me they just visited when I wasn't looking . Been selectively nibbling new veg seedlings and new emerging rose buds 
Do you think I should invite these boys to stay again
Definitely
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.