Bunny Chronicles 2013

So from the beginning, I wanted to garden by working with nature and not fighting nature.  Of course, you fight certain aspects like bad bugs, slugs, which I continually battle right now, and bad weather, but for the most part, I don't want to spend a lot of energy fighting.  Period.  Last spring, we had 4 baby bunnies born in our yard and one stayed; we called her "our bunny" because she seemed to recognize us and had a very relaxed attitude when I was out in the garden.  Anyway, I didn't fence off my garden last year nor did I do it this year. The bunnies never damaged a whole lot last year.  When they were babies, they definitely nibbled and the only plant that really got damaged was my sugar snap peas that I did fence off eventually, but beyond that, when the babies grew up, they stuck to munching our lawn. I'm sure our neighbors think we're absolutely nuts!!

Anyway, this year, our bunny showed up with a friend!!

They showed up in early April and have been hanging around ever since then.  So about a week or 2 ago, I noticed the bunny in my raised bed that was closest to the house. It just happened to be the day I finally decided to remove the tulle from all of the beds; I covered all my beds with either row covers or tulle earlier in the season to insure that the seedlings weren't disturbed by squirrels or infested with any bad insects. I looked at the area she had been and it turned out she had been digging!!  She completely uprooted all of my carrots and a shallow pit had been dug next to my chives.
I went ahead and recovered all of the beds and just observed.  The bunny kept coming back to the same spot and started to dig and tear up the tulle so I decided to go ahead and not fight her and see what she was going to do. 

 Sure enough, she came back and dug a burrow!!!!

She used pine needles and my chives to line the burrow. For days, the burrow looked the same until a day ago...

The night before, we were outside in the garden and 6 adult bunnies plus a little tiny baby bunny from a different bunny mama were all running around in our yard.  They didn't care one bit that we were out there! But then the next morning, the burrow was covered and tufts of fur were laying around the bed.  I think she had her babies!!!

The boy strongly believes that she chose our yard and the bed closest to the house because she was comfortable with us and knew the babies would be safe.  I hope that's the case!!  I've totally uncovered all of the beds and it's been almost a week now.  None of the crops have been damaged by any of the bunnies and I've only found a handful of holes dug into the soil from the squirrels.  I wonder if the bunnies know or collectively decided to not touch our crops so they can have a bunny safe zone in our yard.  Who knows, but right now, I'm glad I don't have to fence off anything and that every night we are entertained by bunnies in our yard!