Mosshead

actually building the garden

May 9th, 2006

We laid down cardboard in the fall, and by spring the grass was well mulched. It was now time to put in our sweat equity. We needed a deer fence, raised beds and bins for compost, soil, manure and chips.
Our other challenge … rabbits! Our neighbor had had a drunken epiphany a couple years prior to our arrival and had set her rabbits free. I once stood on the front porch and counted 72 rabbits in the corner of the yard viewable from the porch. They were everywhere. So, we had to build a fence. We had to build one anyway to keep the deer out, but I thought that rabbits being a digging kind of animal, we should dig the fence in a little.

I used a maddock to dig a foot deep ditch all around the perimeter and sunk the fencing into it. This was labor intensive and it was only after we were done that we actually watched the rabbits closely enough to discover that the rabbits were too fat and lazy to be bothered with trying to dig into our precious garden. Especially when they were surrounded by ample food supply. So, that’s a permaculture lesson we shouldn’t have missed.

Deer have always been an issue for gardeners. It’s because they’re grazers - they’ll take a bite out of one young plant and move on to take a bite out of another. When growing food, you don’t really want to eat something that’s been inside a deer’s mouth.

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