Garden or vegetable bed
A fence solves what repellents cannot.
Deer and rabbits eat gardens because a garden is the most nutritious thing for a quarter mile. Nothing changes that except a physical barrier.
Cultivated plants are bred for tenderness, watered through drought, and fertilised. Ornamental beds and vegetable rows sit at the edge of cover, which is exactly where browsing animals prefer to feed. There is no version of this in which the garden stops being attractive.
What you are hearing
Clean, angled cuts on stems at rabbit height, roughly a foot off the ground, are rabbit work. Ragged, torn tips higher up are deer, which have no upper incisors and tear rather than slice. Whole seedlings gone overnight with scratching is more likely squirrels or chipmunks caching.
What to do
- 01Identify the browser from the cut before buying anything.
- 02For rabbits, fit two-foot chicken wire with the bottom six inches turned outward along the ground.
- 03For deer, either an eight-foot fence or two parallel fences four feet apart; they jump high or wide, not both.
- 04Protect the specific plants that matter rather than the whole plot, if a full fence is impractical.
- 05Rotate any repellent weekly, and accept that it is a supplement to a barrier, not a substitute.
What not to do
- Do not rely on repellents, ultrasonic devices, or predator urine as your main defence.
- Do not trap and relocate rabbits; the vacancy fills within days.
- Do not leave fencing loose at the base, which is where every rabbit gets in.
Stopping it happening again
- Choose planting that browsers avoid for the outer edge of beds, and keep the vulnerable plants inside.
- Clear brush piles and dense low cover immediately beside the vegetable garden.
- Fence before planting rather than after the first loss.
When to call someone licensed
Rarely needed. Fencing contractors, rather than wildlife operators, are the right call for a deer-proof perimeter.
Find a rehabilitatorUnderstand the animal
The cottontail eating your beans is the same animal whose young appear in your lawn each spring, and it is very unlikely to be a different individual year to year.