Desperate Measures

Well, I was wrong, and I might as well admit it at the start. Rabbits will take a nibble of just about anything, it seems, and they will certainly eat most of a tender young eggplant or pepper plant, given the opportunity. They don’t care for melons, cucumbers, and squash, but one muskmelon plant had a single broad leaf half bitten away the night after I transplanted it into the flowerbed.

At first, as I have chronicled, the peas and beans were decimated by these creatures. That’s when I put up the fence. It worked—for one or two nights. I don’t know how they found their way back in, for I did my best to see that there were no gaps at the bottom, but they did, and the new beans lost their heads on a nightly basis. Outside the main garden, I had planted the eggplants and peppers, and two mornings later found one of the larger eggplants reduced to a single sprouting leaf, while several of the peppers were leafless on one side.

I contained the problem by placing plastic plant pots over the larger plants and plastic Dixie cups (of which, luckily, I possessed a nearly endless supply) over the smaller ones each night. Putting those cups on the plants each night was hard work, but it did the job. Rabbits are good at getting past barriers, but it seems that they’re just not smart enough to figure out what’s underneath an upside-down cup.

Soon, however, the carnage moved back into an unexpected quarter of the main garden. Peter Rabbit fancied a forbidden bite of lettuce. The invaders in my garden ignored the puny lettuce and spinach seedlings, but the Swiss chard, a tough, leafy member of the beet family, was disappearing, one handsome, three-inch seedling at a time. I spent a few nights covering each plant in that long row of chard with its own cup. But I was about to go on vacation for a week, and although I had arranged for a neighbor to water the plants, I knew no one who would willingly cover dozens of plants with cups each night and remove the cups in the morning. I felt rather foolish about the entire venture myself.

Stronger measures were necessary, I decided. Back to the hardware store I drove, grumbling all the way. I brought home a roll of chicken wire three feet wide and fifty feet long, the only size the store still had in supply. Although I should have been preparing for the next morning’s eleven-hour drive to my conference in Tennessee, I instead stayed up past midnight hacking at the chicken wire, holding each section of roll open with a chair on one side and a piano bench on the other while I clipped the wires. When I finished cutting through a section of wire, it would snap back into a curved position, scraping my arms and legs.

From the smaller wire sections, I fashioned cylindrical cages for the peppers and eggplants. For the row of Swiss chard and onions, I cut a nine and a half–foot length of wire. This larger section rolled and buckled until I manhandled (or womanhandled) it into submission. I straightened four wire clothes hangers and threaded them through the wire at regular intervals, then, with much difficulty and swearing, I curved the entire piece longwise into a row cover.

Early the next morning, I covered my seedlings and maneuvered the row cover into place (muttering many hard oaths the entire while). The row cover didn’t fit the ground exactly, so on its exposed side (away from the fence) I shoveled a few inches of dirt from between the garden rows.

None of this made my subsequent driving trip any easier, but at least I had peace of mind. I had awakened that morning dreaming that I was handing an eggplant to a fellow named Itai (an Israeli name, I think, but the word coincidentally means “ouch” in Japanese) whom I had met at journalism school and who had lived down the hall from me. The dream was disturbing, because I had no reason to believe my worthy former colleague would care for the plant. My rather quixotic last stand against rabbits at least convinced me that I had done all I could for the garden. Though success was not guaranteed, the garden would have to hold its own against Nature’s fury for the next five days.