It's Wabbit Season!

Let the games begin. As a gardener, nothing gives you more pleasure than waking up, looking out the window, surveying your yard and thinking about how the back-breaking, joint-swelling pain you endured from weeding, planting, and digging was all worth it. Seedlings start  to sprout, flowers begin to bloom, vines begin to creep. Your winter-ugly yard has been transformed into an oasis.

Then, as you stand there with a big self-satisfying grin on your face, it happens. You spot a rabbit dining on your garden. For me, the reaction usually consists of banging on the window, flinging the door wall open, running out onto the patio in my pajamas, screaming at what the neighbors, I'm sure, perceive to be nothing, clapping my hands, waving my arms furiously in the air, and spewing all kinds of expletives and shooing noises at the wind. I've never, ever been a proponent of guns, but I must tell you that rabbits drive me right to the edge of wanting  to own a big one. It's always this time of year I start to relate to Glenn Close's character in Fatal Attraction.

It's funny how creative we get in trying to dissuade these cute, yet pain-in-the-ass critters. Fences, fake owls, and sprays that smell like rotten eggs or contain wolf urine or something so abstract you don't even want to know what it is that's dripping on you. One year, my Aunt Mary had read that human hair keeps rabbits at bay. Having had her own rabbit issues, she came home with a bag of hair from her hair salon lady. I'm quite certain that as she spread it around the base of her flowers in her front yard, her elderly neighbors thought she was performing some kind of black magic, voodoo ritual and quietly closed their blinds afraid that she might see them watching her and then cast some sort of evil spell on them.

The backyard at our former house consisted of a wood deck and a yard with a privacy fence. Unfortunately, I may as well have put up a sign that said "rabbit breeding grounds and all the free flowers you can destroy." Rabbits love nothing more than a deck which they can crawl under to procreate, and then a fenced in yard which keeps predators at bay. You'd think, "well, you have a privacy fence, how do they get in there in the first place?" Let me tell you, I've seen rabbits convert their bodies into jello in which their skeletal structure seems to dissolve right before my very eyes as I watch them slither under the fence or in between an opening that only a nickel could fit through. 

One summer, I had a baby rabbit take up residence under the deck, which was only inches away from my impatiens around the maple tree. I observed his routine from the kitchen window. Sneak out from the deck....munch, munch, munch....sneak back under the deck. Aaaaahhhh "life is good" he thought.

At first, I thought I would try to corral it into an area where it could leave the yard. Please...what a joke. I was such an amateur back then. I couldn't even touch the door wall to step out onto the deck before it's supersonic ears picked up my vibrations  and disappeared under the deck.  Seriously, it was like an apparition. Here one nanosecond and then just "poof"--gone.

Eventually, I decided to trap it and remove it from the yard. Having watched many a cartoon while growing up, I decided to use a laundry basket, a stick, some fishing line, and of course, some lettuce and carrots. I put the bait between the deck and the flowers and then put the laundry basket upside down over the food, of course, one end was propped up with a "Y" shaped stick. Then, fishing line was attached to the stick and I ran it up to the kitchen window through the screening, and voila! You have a rabbit trap. Then, I waited. It didn't take long, and oh my goodness, for the first time ever I started to understand the thrill of why Ed went deer hunting. As I watched this little critter work his way closer to the "snacks" my heart started pounding out of my chest. I found myself saying aloud "Just a little more...closer....closer..." Seriously, I felt like Elmer Fudd. Then, he was under the basket. I quickly pulled on the fishing line and "zing" I had me a rabbit! It was so exhilirating!!!! It was so ridiculously easy, I couldn't even believe it.

The next step, however, was not so ridiculously easy. The plan was to somehow get him out from the under the basket and out of the yard. Hmmmm....this was something I hadn't quite thought about. This little bunny was so freaked out and bouncing off the walls of the laundry basket like a pinball. To lift the basket, stick a gloved hand in there (he was only about the size of a large avocado), and grab him was going to be a challenge.  Let me correct that, an impossible task. Sure enough, he escaped. So, I quickly improvised my trap and put the bait on some screening so that the next time I caught him, all I had to do was gather the screening up around the basket. Great inventions require lots of trial and error, you know!

These days, since my yard is wide open to the western edge of Canton, I construct a netting fence around my wildflower garden. Everything else is fair game. I do understand that the rabbits (and deer) were here first, and I try to plant things that they supposedly don't care for, which, realistically is nothing. I have been very fortunate in that the deer do not bother my yard in the summer months. Thank goodness, because I don't think I have laundry basket big enough for that!