3 min readThere’s nothing worse than spending hours on your beautiful garden, just to wake up one day and find that nature’s cutest pest has been nibbling on your plants. While adorable, rabbits often feast on your flowers and prevent you from getting any fruit and veggie harvests, all while likely burrowing nearby and messing up your landscaping.
While attracting pollinators (even incidental ones, like rabbits) to your yard is a good thing, anyone with a green thumb will tell you that you should do everything possible to make sure these cuties, as well as deer, don’t want to hang out in your garden. Thankfully, we’ve come up with a six-step guide on how to keep rabbits away from your plants and flowers.
Keep reading to find out the straightforward ways you can help prevent rabbits from feasting on your flowers, fruits, vegetables, and herbs before you even have a chance to appreciate them.
Additional copy by Meghan Shouse.
Create a Physical Barrier
One of the easiest ways to keep rabbits away from your garden is to install a wire fence around your garden beds. While this isn't the most aesthetically pleasing method of keeping critters at bay, it is very effective. It's best to install chicken wire four feet high and bury it at least six inches deep so rabbits can't easily hop over or burrow under it to get at your plants. To protect bulbs, they advise putting up a dome or cage of chicken wire secured over the bed.
Pick Your Plants Strategically
Hungry rabbits will eat almost anything, but an easy way to keep them looking elsewhere for food is to plant things that they dislike. Choose plants such as forsythia, lilac bush, zinnias, daffodils, lavender, and snapdragons for flower gardens. In your vegetable patches, choose onions, peppers, garlic, or other highly fragrant bulbs. They're also known to avoid asparagus and potatoes.
Frighten Them With Mirrors
Supposedly, rabbits are afraid of their reflection! Placing small mirrors or jars filled with water around your garden is an easy way to keep rabbits away. It's best to place these reflective items near your most prized plants—or the ones they attack the most.
Bring In Their Least Favorite Smells
Rabbits sniff around a lot. You can try to keep them away from your garden by planting strongly fragrant things that'll send them hopping. For example, rabbits detest onions, so you can plant onion bulbs or sprinkle cut onions around your beds. Repeat this method with Irish Spring soap shavings, hot peppers, garlic, or talcum powder for a similar effect. This method is not foolproof, but gardeners have seen success!
Spray Rabbit Repellents
There are many repellent sprays you can buy that are safe for plants and pets but will keep pests like rabbits and deer away. Remember to spray your plants regularly (as often as the formula's instructions allow) since rain and moisture from watering your lawn can decrease the efficacy over time.
Fill In Their Nesting Spots
Rabbits don't travel far, so odds are, if they're nibbling in your garden, they live nearby. Fill in any holes you come across and block off any access under your home or deck to deter rabbits from nesting. It's also a good idea to remove any piles of thatch, brush, or leaves that rabbits could burrow beneath.
