And How Does Your Garden Grow????

Not very well if there are rabbits in your yard!

Every year I plant a vegetable garden because I love tomatoes right off of the vine, as well as other fresh veggies. 

In previous years, we've had a problem with rabbits and deer getting into the garden and eating the plants early in the growing season.  However, this year the deer hasn't been around (hmmmm....I wonder what happened to him?), and there was a hawk frequenting the sky around our yard during the Spring and early Summer.  Since we'd see the hawk, then find tufts of fur in the grass and didn't see any rabbits, we thought our garden would do very well this year. 

Well, we haven't seen the hawk for a couple of weeks, and last week I found that the bush bean plants had "nibbles" on their leaves and within days were totally devoid of leaves.  Because I really wanted fresh garden beans, I went to the garden center & bought pole beans thinking that if they were to grow up a stake, the rabbits wouldn't get to them.  How wrong my thinking was.....although the plants were fairly well grown, within one day of planting and staking the plants all of the leaves had been eaten.....and when I went out to water the garden this morning, the entire plants were gone - nothing left. Just the stake.  I had even bought rabbit and deer repellent at the garden center, but it certainly didn't deter those nasty rabbits.

I guess I'll be frequenting Farmer's Markets this summer in order to get fresh green beans since I'm not able to grow them myself.  Any suggestions for keeping rabbits from eating my bean plants would be greatly appreciated.