Use This Simple Trick to Stop Rabbits From Eating All Your Plants

If you've got a bunny problem in your garden, you are not alone. One day your greens are thriving, and the next day you wake up to see them nibble down to a nub. Well, before you rage, quit your garden, I'm going to show you how to keep bunnies out of your garden the smart way. By understanding how they think, what they're looking for, and how to make your garden way less appealing. And don't worry, we're not talking about harming bunnies in any way here. We're just going to outsmart them. Let's start with why bunnies show up in your garden in the first place. As development and housing spreads to more and more wild places, bunnies are losing their habitat. They've got less places to take up shelter, to raise their young, and to find food. So it's natural that they would come to your garden because they can find food here, they can raise their young, and there's a good chance that there's no predators anywhere around. So you got to understand three crazy things about rabbits. Number one, they reproduce really fast. So one mama bunny can have up to six litters a year. And each litter is going to have four to six bunnies in it. We're talking 24 new baby bunnies per mama bunny every single season. Season. Now, these mama bunnies, they are looking for soft soil that they can dig into and make a nice little shallow nest even in plain sight. Finally, rabbits. They eat plants. They're herbivores, so they're looking for fresh, young, tender shoots, leafy greens to munch on every single day. In other words, if your garden is full of plants, has nice soft soil, and looks like a good place to hide some baby bunnies. The rabbits, they're definitely moving in. Beyond that, your garden is typically fenced off or protected from larger animals. In other words, your garden is a bunny safe haven. When most people feel the threat of bunnies coming into their garden, their instinct is to build a physical barrier. A fence, a rope cover, a cloche, some kind of physical thing that can go between the rabbit and the garden. And while this is a good solution, it's not the best one. Let me tell you the better way. It's to think about predators. So bunnies, they are a prey animal. They literally survive by avoiding all the other creatures that want to eat them up. Their predators are things like foxes, coyotes, cats and dogs, snakes and owls. So what you want to do is think like the predator. Because if you can think like the predator, you can start to outsmart the bunnies that want to eat from your garden. Now, the first and best, best way to bring the predator idea to your garden is to actually create habitat for them. This is the concept I call the living fence. I have a whole video all about how to create a living fence. You can watch that after you're done with this video. So a living fence is made of native plants and pollinator friendly plants, and it surrounds the perimeter of your vegetable garden. In other words, it is a habitat for all kinds of creatures and critters, especially those that might prey on rabbits. Now, are you going to have coyotes and foxes and owls just because you have a native plant space around your garden? Probably not. But having these large plants that provide the perfect nesting places for things like foxes and dogs and cats will suggest to rabbits that there may be predators nearby and can scare them off from heading into your garden, having babies, and eating all your food. Now, these native plant spaces should surround your vegetable garden, and they are literally going to act bodyguards for all the food you're growing inside. They're going to bring in hawks and owls and snakes, and they are going to do a great job of scaring off the bunnies. But you can also take it a step further with creating sights and sounds and smells that suggest to the rabbits that predators are nearby. I first learned this trick when I was having raccoons in my garden, and I went to a local garden center and I was like, help, raccoons are eating all my food. And this lady said, well, all you need to do is get some coyote urine. And I was like, two questions. How did you get that? And what does coyote urine have to do with the raccoons in my garden? She quickly explained to me that coyotes were the predators for raccoons. And so if raccoons smelled the urine around my garden, they would be less likely to come and prey on my tomatoes because they'd be afraid that they turn into prey before they got to eat their dinner. She never did tell me how they got that urine out of the coyote, but that's for another day. So same idea applies for your garden. You want to have smells of predators around your garden space. I love having my dogs come in and around my garden as often as possible, and I definitely don't mind if they lift a leg or two while they're at it. You can do all kinds of things to bring in the smells of predator animals. Beyond smells, you can add sights so you can put all kinds of decoys around your garden. Now, you will need to be more Mindful of these and move them around your garden space. Things like owls and plastic snakes. One of my favorite Mississippi farmers I met when I first started my garden, as I took a tour of his garden, he had little rubber snakes everywhere in his garden. I was so confused and he said it was a big part of his pest control system. Just having all these snakes that he regularly moved throughout the garden to new places. So you want to have sights, even just scarecrows or things that move or shift in the wind can be just enough to give the rabbit the idea that something big is lurking and they need to watch out and stay out of your garden. You've got the smells, you've got the sights, and then you can also have sounds. So now there's all kinds of decoys you can buy. They'll produce sounds under the ground and above the ground. You can get lasers and you can get kinds of little sounds and beeps that will happen as soon as there's activity in your garden again. These sounds suggest to the rabbit that predators are on their way and they should be on their way too. Now, if you want to really supercharge your bunny proof garden, then you would do a combo of both of these things. So build a native plant and pollinator friendly area around your vegetable garden space and then add in the decoys, the sights, the smells and the sounds. So. So that rabbits know that predators are for sure lurking right around all those plants they're dying to eat and nest in. Now, I don't know if you noticed, but no bunnies were harmed in the making of this video. And if you like the idea of not harming wildlife but also keeping your garden alive, then I want to teach you my organic pest control system. I'll put a link to that right below this video. Now, I touched on the idea of putting in protective covers around your garden as a way to keep out rabbits. Things like fences and covers and cloches. If you want me to go deep of those subjects, please put it in the comments below and I'll make a video all about it. In the meantime, you got to know that you can have rabbits living around your house and also have a thriving garden. The magic starts when you start thinking like a rabbit and start welcoming predators into your space. When you start seeing pest control in this way, it completely changes the game. Thanks so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. You can keep listening anywhere. You love getting your podcast delivered on Apple podcasts, on Spotify, iHeartRadio, you name it, we are there for you. 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