Design

My gardening companion caught a shot of a rabbit eating a fern recently. This is a quite unusual sighting; rabbits would normally eat more tender shoots. But, this one was nibbling vigorously on a fern frond!

WAY down the slope, almost to the bottom of the ravine (below our small house in the mountains), we spotted a grazing rabbit early this evening. The long camera lens gave me a better shot... In perfect rabbit fashion, it proceeded to eat entire stalks of grasses (probably from the winter-strewn hay that my gardening companion had put down for mulch). As wildlife gardeners, we're happy to see such a large and robust rabbit, obviously a survivor over years; as vegetable gardeners, we hope s/he will stay down on the slope eating grasses! But it would take a bold rabbit to make it up to the raised beds above the house, the ones full of lettuces. We'll see! But we had fun watching him/her consume the grasses (through binoculars) this afternoon.

In our garden, currently, 'our' rabbit hangs out here. the 'front meadow' aka the Piedmont prairie But all of the young okra seedlings, and a number of squash leaves in the satellite garden disappeared yesterday evening, so I don't know whether to think 'rabbit' or 'young woodchuck.' Oh, well, we don't much care for okra (it was an experiment) and unless the squash vine borers hurry up (there have been a few casualties already), we'll have more squash than we can eat. We're fortunate (and I'm grateful) to have plenty of space to spread out herbivore impact. Probably the mama woodchuck will come up from the woodpile and eat all of the squash vines while we're up in the mountains this weekend and I won't sound so positive!

I have a special fondness for rabbits. Probably if we had more of them, and they were a nuisance in my vegetable garden, I wouldn't think so favorably about them. We live in a small town that's quite suburban in character, really; although we're not in the 'suburbs,' we're not totally rural anymore, either. There's plenty of open space here, but it's increasingly punctated by a mix of houses, pop-up malls, etc. Rabbits are a scarce commodity around here. I always enjoy spotting one on a morning walk or in our garden. Growing up, I loved The Story of Peter Rabbit and all of the other Beatrix Potter tales. My mom even gave me a collection of Beatrix Potter stories as a keepsake as a young adult. So I was delighted to see this large rabbit in the front meadow this morning. S/he was nibbling on grasses, and looks like quite the robust specimen.

There's a story in the New York Times that's among the most currently e-mailed in their online version, called Peter Rabbit Must Die . Hmm. It's a good article, and I'm certainly guilty of moving a young woodchuck out of my garden, but the comments are interesting. But we haven't had many rabbits in our garden, and we've been happy to see the ones we've had, since it seems to me to represent an improvement of habitat, from lawn to a diverse habitat garden. So, I was delighted to see a very small young rabbit this afternoon. First, s/he was being very still under the cover of one of our dogwoods, and then ventured forth onto the lawn, and then ducked into the cover of a nearby border.

Maybe since Beatrix Potter stories were favorites of mine as a child, I've got a soft spot for Eastern cottontails. As we converted our lawn to include more shrubs, trees, herbaceous plants, and mulched areas, we were delighted to see cottontails appear. They never seemed to bother my vegetable plants, even lettuce and carrots, apparently much preferring the white clover that punctuated the remaining lawn. They like broad-leaved plants best, so succulent stems and leaves of clover, plantain, and dandelion make a perfect meal. We even had a small family one season. But then they disappeared, we thought because our neighbors and their young children encouraged stray cats by feeding them, and a couple of them were quite determined hunters. We figured that they were responsible to the chipmunk decline, disappearance of cottontails, not mention worry about birds in our garden. So I was delighted late yesterday afternoon to see an Eastern cottontail hopping off to cover, as I came ...