Just When You Thought Things Were Going OK…

So I came home from work today, and as my normal routine, I let The Ladies out, collected my eggs and cleaned out the coop.  Then I went to the garden to see what needed watering...   My heart sank when I saw this:

 

All the leaves you see at the top of the bed are just that – leaves.  As in not connected to anything rooted in the dirt.

If you remember, the bed was supposed to look like this:

 

 

A deer had hopped my fence and ate most of my beets   

They left me a couple 

You can’t see it in the picture, but there are huge clod-hopping deer tracks going all through the bed. It (they?) even ate a pepper plant and stomped over one of the new seedlings    I was soooooo looking forward to making more Harvard beets this year, too…

Here are where most of the tracks are

 

My corn and cucumber bed was visited too, but fortunately aside from losing a few corn plants, it was relatively unscathed…

 

And THEN, to top it off  - as I was doing some fixing and watering, you’ll never guess what I saw inside my garden fence.  Go ahead guess.

Yep.   You got it.

A baby bunny.

Yeah. 

So I picked it up and put it outside the fence. 

That was the first time I’ve ever heard a rabbit scream.  I wasn’t doing anything to it – I was just holding it.  I guess it was just freaked out and screamed.  It was weird.

So anyway, as I was continuing my fixing and watering, guess what else I saw inside my garden fence.  Yeah.  Another baby bunny.

So I picked it up to put outside the fence - it screamed too.  It’s amazing how loud such a little thing can be 

So I went about my business and of course a third baby bunny shows up.  So I picked it up.  (This one didn’t scream).  I had this bunny in one hand and went to get my camera to get a picture of it and of course it got a away.  I’m sure it hid in my holding bed that is way over-crammed with perennials, and I couldn’t find it again.

Flash forward to later in evening when I got home from a meeting.  I went to check on the garden and guess what I saw inside my garden fence.  Yeah – Mama Bunny (I’m assuming).  So I chased her and saw her go through the hole she chewed through the fence.  Just like Sapphire01 warned me about. 

OK, so they’ve all probably all been inside my garden fence for a while now – but they really haven’t caused any damage.  So far. (Unless they’ve been the ones eating my strawberries instead of the birds)  I definitely give them points for that    But there’s no point in taking any chances, so I put wire fencing along the bottom of plastic fencing – at least most of it (I ran out of the extra stuff I had lying around) .

There’s not much I can do about the deer unless I go to a higher fence (not going to happen – at least not too much higher) or an electric fence.   I really didn’t want to mess with an electric fence, but I may not have a choice.  I guess I’ll have to see what happens…