Now here's a topic guaranteed to raise the blood pressure of anyone trying to grow their own food: wild animals.
If you grow food, some animal is going to want to eat it. And really, who can blame them? You've conveniently consolidated a living salad bar right there! All they have to do is get to it!
And get to it, they will.
In my gardening life, I have lost at least some crops to rabbits, groundhogs, raccoons, gophers, and deer.
Our neighbor in New York built what amounted to a stockade to encircle her vegetable garden. It was a wood fence eight feet tall. This did keep out the deer, but unless it had buried wire under it, it would not keep out the diggers like groundhogs and rabbits.
Some people sprinkle or spray their plants with hot pepper liquids, in the hopes of making their plants unappealing to furry marauders. I've never tried this.
I prefer to outsource my garden defense. And that means guns, traps, and dogs. Not too pretty sometimes, but effective.
I have never gardened in a place where I didn't have dogs patrolling. They are the most useful deterrent to garden thieves. But for this to work, they have to be out night and day, and they have to have access to the actual garden. This means that sometimes, they will cause their own damage, but it's much less than a rabbit would cause left unchecked.
I leave the guns and traps to A. and Cubby.
A. has successfully trapped both rabbits and gophers, essentially eliminating them as a problem on this property. Although we do have to keep an eye out for new incursions so he can take care of them before they get established.
Cubby likes to set up camp at the next-door abandoned house around sunset with his .410 shotgun and watch for rabbits. They tend to hide over there and make sorties onto our property to eat things at night. So getting them at their point of origin is the best option.
So tell me, my fellow gardeners: How have you managed to deter animals in your garden?
Last year rabbits ate all my beans and most of everything else — first time for that! My fear has always been a yard calf who just cruises the barrio looking for a meal, so I have hog panels around the garden. Now in addition to that I'm allowing all the rabbit hunting the oldest wants to do, whenever he wants. We have a dog, but she's not very scary, I guess.
ReplyDeleteOur biggest problem has been deer. Here in the suburbs they're not to keen on any of the options to take them down, so it's all about keeping them out. And that is basically following the car alarm theory: a determined thief will get in, so we try to make it marginally more annoying to get in our yard than our neighbors'.
ReplyDeleteI've seen them clear 5-foot panels as easy as I'd step over a traffic cone, but we've got a narrow space between the deck and garage, a narrow space between the garage and back neighbor's trellis, only one easy entrance. We bird feeders on big metal poles right where they'd want to land, and so far they haven't been back.
I'm active in a community garden. We use tall fences to keep the deer out. Individuals have low electric fences powered by solar panels to keep out groundhogs when they dig under the tall fences. Maintaining longer electric fences hasn't worked with our collective, so we've given up on that.
ReplyDeleteWire on the bottom of planting beds against gophers, plastic fencing around the edges, along with anything at all I can find to keep the deer out, mesh over the top because of birds, diatomaceous earth around plants to keep the sowbugs off. . . but it is a continual war, and I have not ever succeeded in growing more than a few token tomatoes or some little lettuces or a few heads of broccoli before they get covered in aphids.
ReplyDeleteTo quote Winston Churchill, "Nevuh nevuh nevuh give up".
I grew up in extremely rural SC. We had plenty of well established, well producing pecan trees. My daddy used to get so mad at the squirrels that would hop from limb to limb eating the nuts. He would sit on our back porch with a BB gun and pick them off.Every one he got, he would skin, because dinner, and he would nail the fur to the tree as a message. He had to do it every couple of weeks, but we always had pecans.
ReplyDeleteJenlee: I love this. Especially nailing the fur to the tree as a message to other squirrels. :-)
ReplyDeleteSame as you. Dogs, traps, and a .22.
ReplyDeleteOur worst problem is groundhogs. We have trapped several but could never catch the grandparent of them all, a whopper the size of a cocker spaniel. My husband finally shot him.
ReplyDeleteKristin: my mama was always mortified and would make him take them down when company would be coming.
ReplyDelete