let’s talk damage: Last week I lost (as in eaten to the ground) ALL the cleome starts, 6 newly planted snapdragons, a climbing rose, 4 clematis including  a ‘Betty Corning’ near the deck . It is hovering in some sort of stasis refusing to leaf out again or grow at all (probably in self-defense ). It has been caged and all the other caged plants have started to recover, a definite WTF or WTH if you don’t like the F word.

This Monday in some sort of selective dinning extravaganza all the asters were chewed to within an inch of their lives, an amazing feat considering they are interspersed throughout all of the gardens over the entire acre+. Tuesday night they went on a clematis binge, 3 more vines chewed off at ground level thank you very much.

The gardens here have a very twighlight zone look to them, as anything that has managed to bloom is doing so at a greatly reduced height so no vines are even halfway up arbors and you have to sqwouch  done to see or smell anything else.

I have left one, yup one, lamium plant. Apparantly they were too full to finish them off. This year I will have no lovely sweet peas which I will mourn because no sweet pea flowers=no sweet pea seeds and I planted my whole stockpile. Out of all my cosmos seeds I have 3 struggling plants hardly even worth noticing. Every poppy bloom has been eaten before I ever even see a flower , so no heroin either (just kidding, humor me please I am grief stricken).

New attempts at thwarting them were:

REAL fox urine-liquid in a little bottle. I soaked strips of wool in small ziploc bags that I then punched lots of holes in and hung from strategically located plants. So far the areas of the garden they are in seem to be undisturbed……Is there hope?

Plantskyyd-that’s the blood product- I sprayed this on  every plant in the garden, so all future pictures will look like crime scene photos. Turns out I missed a bed out front and it was the only one devastated in the morning. So maybe again….hope?

Also….a few bunnies have met their maker. Although I am not at liberty to tell you how for fear of repercussion, did you read Watership Down??    Do you know about PETA??   Silence is all you will get from me.

On an unrelated note, did you know that in Australia where the rabbits are trying to take over the government   people use this concoction of oats infused with rat poison to kill the varmints? You can’t get it here, it’s illegal. And did you also know that bunnies can’t swim, well at least they can’t if you are holding them under water with a stick. They are also sensitive to fast moving small metal projectiles. This is all FYI, and has nothing to do with me, Bill or the Garden in the Burrow.