Rabbits have not been a problem for our garden, and that may be because the wooded ravine behind us may harbor a fox or coyote that we espy occasionally. However, two blocks away on a HOA common ground that I have worked on clearing honeysuckle out of I notice that the Staghorn Sumac stalks have been stripped of bark at the ground level.
Benjamin Voigt has a different look at the “problem”
How do you curtail rabbit damage in your garden?
1) It’s not damage. It’s an animal eating. Animals eat, too. If you don’t want wildlife in your garden don’t plant a (wildlife) garden. Plant fake tulips like my grandma did. Plants are not paintings or collector tchotchkes (“I just got Asclepias purpurascens, #7 in the milkweed series!”).
2) Stop helicopter gardening. This is when we treat each plant as precious instead of players in an ecological system that ebbs and flows. Yes, spending $20 on a gallon-sized plant (stop doing that) and seeing it eaten the next day is frustrating, but this is nature. Nature is a good thing.
3) You need more plants. So many plants you can’t tell if one is eaten. Or, you can celebrate when they are eaten because rabbits also feed hawks and foxes. So get more plants. Like in nature. Plants on top of each other, close, in layers, providing far more ecosystem services than plants marooned in an ocean of wood mulch. Let plants touch and cavort. It’s hot.
4) Disturbance can be a good thing, especially in more natural landscapes. We don’t want, and nature doesn’t want, the same static space year after year. That’s not helpful or resilient. So open up that Rent-a-Bison store you’ve always dreamed of.
5) When we scrape away an ecosystem, slap a housing subdivision on it, use lawn as wall-to-wall carpeting, then create a few comparatively small garden beds in that void, OF COURSE wildlife will come to that one little crumb of habitat. The answer is MORE nature, not less; this extends to so many other creatures that we label as pests.