raise those beds!

i serendipitously fell into a solution for deterring rabbits from brunching on my beloved seedlings. I built raised beds with 2x10 lumber. seems for all their bounding and hopping, those offensive Oryctolagus cuniculus cannot vault over a mere 9 3/4 inches!
this becomes a relatively inexpensive way of keeping the peace. or, in my case; keeping the leaves... er, on the plants... get it? cause they don't eat the... ah, forget it.

in constructing these beds, i used angle brackets (the cheaper kind for deck building) to keep the corners together. Once the beds were filled to the brim with dirt the semi-square structure true'd itself up. don't worry about minor undulations in your yard when building your bed, as long as the pits and peaks aren't sufficient to stick your fist through, the filling of the bed will ensure that the frame doesn't move.

for further lepus deterent i planted onions around the perimeter. the green from these isn't sufficient enough to impede my harvesting of inner most plants and the rabbits usually leave onions alone.

I built and filled three raised beds: 4 x 8, 14 x 7 and a 5 x 10 for around 300.00 (cost of corner ties, dirt and lumber). but, for that initial cost, now i don't have to put up chicken wire every year, fiddle with netting enclosures or mesh contraptions. raised beds also easily adopt into the square foot gardening method, become a cold box with ease and can be covered with bird netting (if your soil isn't all the way to the top). overall, this is an easy and attractive way to keep your plants nibble free and just that much easier to weed/ harvest (i mean: hey, 1o inches is ten less inches that i have to stoop down, right?).

one last thing about raised beds; the local cats see a giant box as, well, a giant box. i haven't figured out how to keep felix domesticus from making occational, er, deposits in the garden. luckily this is only an issue before the plants have really taken off with foliage. and, really, is there any way to control a cat?

so i say: good luck and good riddance! (to those herbavoric hare's, i mean...)