Keep Rabbits from Eating Your Vegetables

Rabbits are often portrayed as soft, lovable, cuddly creatures. While they really may be soft, and they may even be cuddly, they are not lovable, at least not if you are a gardener. Rabbits love eating your garden, seeing it as a free, all-you-can-eat buffet. And, unfortunately, while the rabbits' natural predators, such as the fox, have been dying off with the destruction of their environment, rabbits are as prolific as ever. Fortunately, you can keep rabbits out of your garden. It will come as a bit of an inconvenience, but keeping the rabbits out will definitely be worth the effort.

One of the most basic, but also most effective, things you can do is built a fence around your garden. It is best to use chicken wire since that is small enough that the rabbits will not be able to push their way through the holes. Rabbits may not be as good diggers as the cartoons would have us believe, but they do dig, so it is very important to make sure the chicken wire goes into the ground several inches. It should also go above ground about two feet, since rabbits can hop. If you do not like the ugly metal chicken wire, there is some that is coated with green plastic, which is a little easier to work with, though it can still be unsightly.

If you do not want to use fencing, or you want to use something along with fencing to make it more effective, there are a few more things that you can do. Rabbits will be warded off by certain scents, and if you surround your garden by these scents, rabbits will stay away. The first scent is blood. Just sprinkle dried blood around your garden and the rabbits will stay away. An alternative to this is using fox urine. You can purchase fox urine at many gardening stores. The best way to use it is in conjunction with a fence. Just tie cotton balls to the fence and pour fox urine on the cotton balls every couple of weeks.

One last thing that you can try is to sprinkle human hair throughout your garden. This should work fairly well. The good thing about this method is as the hair decomposes it works as a fertilizer for your lawn. Just go to your local barber shop or salon and they should be more than happy to give you a bag of hair.