On Rabbits and Garden Salad Bars

Do you have rabbit damage in your garden?

Ready for a radical thought? It’s not damage. It’s nature. It’s an animal using a plant to survive, and the plant was designed to be eaten.

Yes, it stinks when herbivores eat what cost money and then curtail our garden dreams, to the point where we have to pivot / alter our dreams to fit the reality — which can be hard and frustrating, like marriage (we ARE married to our gardens, folks).

But maybe the problem with rabbits eating plants is that we see it as a problem. Also, we tend to plant this way: one specimen marooned in wood mulch (or icky rock!) not allowed to touch other plants. First off, this is like putting spotlights on the plant with flashy neon lights that say “eats — open all night.”

Just HAVING a garden is sort of the same, especially if you live in a place with few other resources — food, shelter, general habitat — like most urban and suburban areas.

You’ve put out a bunny buffet. They are thankful. Wouldn’t you be? Especially when there’s only lawn and concrete to choose from?
Now, if you want to see less plant eating, here are some tricks that use principles found in nature vs trying to force a square peg in a round hole (hello foliage spray of cayenne and garlic, or chicken wire, or sleeping with your plants). Still, nothing in life is guaranteed:

1) Herbivores tend to avoid plants with aromatic, waxy, or spiky foliage. Not a hard and fast rule as sometimes you gotta eat what you gotta eat, especially if not much else is available. So plants on this list we use include: Eryngium yuccifolium, Monarda spp, Blephilia spp, Symphyotrichum oblongifolium, etc.

2) Bodyguard plants. In nature plants tend to be close together and layered up, so it’s a bit harder to find a tasty Dalea purpurea for example. Surrounding the really choice Pringles of the plant world with grasses and sedges can help — because those plants tend to not be browsed. So if you’re planting a shade or sun meadow using a matrix of bunchgrasses or sedge, you’re already ahead of the game.

3) More plants. The more plants you have, the less you’ll notice if one is topped or missing. It’s pretty cool. Plus you have justification to buy more plants (also, select plants that self propagate).

4) Time and patience. As plants root out and are able to store more resources by getting larger, a little pecking here and there won’t affect them too much — in fact, it may be more traumatic to you if you tend to helicopter parent your garden.

Maybe rabbit damage is good since they are lower on the food chain and support so many other species, like predators we definitely need more of (hawks, owls, coyotes, wolves, foxes, etc) but whose habitat we’ve taken away. Those top predators also help keep mice, vole, and bubonic plague rats under control. And we do want to see our plants being eaten, especially if it’s moth and caterpillar larvae, or leafcutter bees, or various beetles, etc — because more pollinators AND baby bird food. We are trying to create an ecosystem, after all, to try and restore some balance up and down trophic levels, and provide a bit of habitat. We’re going to have rabbits, and snakes, and mice, and spiders, and wasps — and this is a good thing. It really is.