Keeping Rabbits Out of Your Garden

Rabbits are wonderful to watch in the wild, scampering about their daily business without a care innt acts like a threat and they won't venture out into the open where they might be seen. For a the world, but when they set up home in or near your prize vegetable patch the unlucky gardener will realise what a handful they can be. Rabbits love tasty vegetables, shrubs and even some trees and for such small creatures they have a huge appetite for destruction.

Getting rid of rabbits can be tricky. Once they've found a good food source they'll keep coming back and as the old saying tells us rabbits are numerous and tend to multiply. If there are no real predators you could find yourself overrun within weeks.

There are however a few tricks you can try before you take more drastic action. Firstly you could try removing what it is that the rabbits find so tasty. Sacrifice these plants and plant some nasty-tasting ones instead. This is all very well if you don't really mind what you grow, but for gardeners who have put effort into their favourite vegetables may not be an ideal solution. You'll also have to research which plants are good and which are bad, so you don't end up having the opposite effect!

Rabbits love to eat clover as well as your plants, so you could try sowing a clover field outside your garden. If you're lucky, this will act as a firebreak and absorb the hungry rabbits before they make it as far as your garden.

You could invest in a cat or a dog to try and scare the rabbits away. Introducing a predator into your garden should keep them out, but this means letting your pet roam around your garden. You may find animal droppings in your vegetable patch! If you have a dog you need to make sure that your garden is secure.

If you want to protect your flowers you could try sprinkling them with something bad-tasting, like chilli powder. This will put any smart rabbit off eating them, but you'll have to reapply the substance after it rains. You won't want to do this to your vegetables however, unless you like very spicy food!

Some people say that hanging shiny objects and things with moving parts around your garden will keep pests like rabbits away. The moveme cheap method, try hanging up CDs on a bit of string.