Razing Vegetables
When I started gardening years ago, I dedicated the first warm Saturday of spring to ground preparation. I spent the day behind a shovel, turning the garden into clods and my hands into blisters. I remember the care with which I planted the helpless, tender tomato and pepper seedlings, concerned that a late frost could still damage them. I always inspected the seedlings the next day, only to find that the leaves had been nibbled off by rabbits.
It doesn’t take a degree in biology to know that plants do not do well without leaves. What the rabbits did was nothing short of cold-toothed murder. The rabbits murdered my seedlings!
At first I reasoned that even rabbits need to eat, and who am I to deny them a meal or two? Because of this attitude, my first few tomato and pepper crops were stunted, confined to those few plants that the rabbits in their satiated stupor somehow missed.
Then one year I decided that it wasn’t asking too much to expect to eat a few of my own vegetables. I finally concluded that the rabbits did not have the Spirit of Inter-Species Respect and Consideration. This conclusion triggered the War of the Rabbits.
The obvious solution, I thought, was to put up a fence. The first fence was a two-foot tall wire mesh, with a two-inch by three-inch grid, which I hoped would establish my territory and which the rabbits would see as a gentlemanly reminder of my ownership. I found out quickly that rabbits are not gentlemen.
The second fence, attached to the first, was chicken wire—no one could tell me where to buy “rabbit wire”—but it was equally ineffective. This was a great puzzle to me, not being yet very familiar with the little furry creatures. I had visions of rabbits pole-vaulting over my barricades. The cost for all this wire and the supporting posts was nearly $50. As I was leaving the hardware store after one purchase I saw a friend, who said, “No tomatoes are worth that much money. “ I did not appreciate at the time the prophetic nature of his comment.
After a few days of contemplation, I realized that since rabbits live in holes, they must be good diggers. My fences would continue to be useless unless I sank them several inches into the ground. Even one section of unburied fence would be sufficient for all the rabbits in town to enter.
The backyard was starting to resemble a concentration camp. There was so much iron in the yard that rabbit compasses a quarter of a mile away pointed directly to my garden. I think I had my own exit on the rabbit expressway.
Since the fences didn’t work well, I tried to think of other methods of protecting the plants. I had to reject land mines and motion-activated machine guns (the permits were too much trouble). I even considered pulling the weeds out of the garden so the rabbits would have no place to hide! The only thing that worked was an individual circular fence which I could anchor into the ground around each plant. The rabbits responded by eating the unprotected petunias outside the garden, pulling the denuded stalks out of the ground by the roots, and scornfully dancing on the mutilated remains.
For several years I took these crimes against nature personally, and the War continued. I did not want to admit defeat, but one day my son came to report, “Dad, there is a NEST of rabbits in our garden.” I could almost hear the unspoken thoughts running through his head: ‘C’mon, Dad, we’re the laughing-stock of the whole neighborhood. The rabbits don’t even slow down as they run into that fortress you built for them. I responded very sagely, “Yes, Son, I don’t know how the rabbits get into the garden.”
Sure enough, Mother Rabbit had chosen my garden as the quietest, snuggest, safest place to raise her brood of leaf-munchers.
That was the turning point of the War. A season or two later I pulled out the fence and turned much of the former battleground into grass. Now I get fresh tomatoes and peppers from the well-tended gardens of friends who have gone on vacation, and the War is mostly forgotten. The remaining garden area now happily grows its weeds, and I think the rabbits are camped out in some other neighbor’s garden.
But those insidious, disrespectful rabbits had the last laugh: I looked out one morning to see a great-grandson of the first rabbit happily munching on some grass. They can eat grass?!? The garden wasn’t sustenance for them, it was dessert!
All those years I thought the rabbits hated me, but I was wrong. This final insult showed that what they felt for me all along was undiluted contempt!
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