How to get rid of rabbits from your garden

How To Rid Rabbits From Your Garden

How to get rid of rabbits from your garden

Don’t let their cute faces fool you; rabbits can do a lot of damage to your garden when your back is turned. Here are a few ideas how to stop rabbits from getting to your garden…


 
Rabbits leave clean–cut damage. If you walk out into your garden one morning and notice that it looks like someone took a pruning shear and snipped off the stems of young plants with clean, angled cuts, mowed your lettuces and beet foliage to the ground, your garden has likely been visited by a rabbit or two.

These low mowers graze close to the ground and sniff out the first tender young shoots and crop them short.

 

Rabbit Deterrent

The most effective way of keeping out rabbits is fencing. A 3/4–inch wire mesh fence should work; bury it 8 to 12 inches deep and it needs to be only about 30 inches high.

As their twitching noses indicate, rabbits sniff a lot. Try sprinkling dried sulfur around or on your plants.

Spread blood meal, cayenne pepper, manure or dog or human hair around plants.

Rabbits also dislike the smell of onions, so try planting these around your garden to further deter the furry creatures.

Irish Spring soap shavings placed in little drawstring bags around the garden will also help to keep rabbits away.

Spray your plants with a mixture of 1 teaspoon Lysol and 1 gallon of water.

Some people protect plants with individual “collars” of tin cans or screening so that the plants may reach a less vulnerable size. Put the collar around each stem for protection.

Some of the deer techniques related to odor, such as manure of a predator and rotten eggs, are also said to work against rabbits.

Install automatic sprinklers that are triggered by a motion sensor. If rabbits are sprayed with water every time they enter your garden, they may stay out.

Spray your plants with a solution of hot sauce and water. Reapply the solution after each rain.

 
Have any of your own ideas? Leave a comment and let the rest of us know!

30 Comments

    1. It does kill some plants if used full strength (weeds, grass,) but apparently okay with many others if diluted. I’ve removed reference to the vinegar diluted with hot sauce so as not to present confusion or a possible mishap. Thanks for the comment.

  1. Good ideas, sometime they work, and sometime they don’t! But then, its too late. Your beets or green beans are gone. Almost as bad as a groundhog!
    My method, keep a box trap near the garden set & ready all the time. If you see a rabbit, after day two and he doesn’t get in the trap, he is eliminated with a .22 CB and buried in the garden for fertilizer. If I can catch him in the trap, he gets a new home at my place of employment. I re-homed several last year. Even an opossum or two.

    1. You kill a rabbit without eating it??? What a waste!! Give me a call next time and I’ll fix you some rabbit stew that will make your mouth water… Crock pot rabbit with veggies and onion soup mix sprinkled on top is really good too!

      1. Yal, I know, but city rabbits aren’t good to eat in the summer? That is why I would rather re-home them, but like people, some a re real hard headed and are delt with. Its comparing the loss of one drum stick compared to 50-100 qts of green beans.
        I raise real rabbits for meat. Wild rabbit doesn’t hold a candle to tame rabbit anyway. I have collected a herd of neighborhood cats that may help me solve the rabbit problem. Just a few table scraps to keep them coming around and whalaaaaa. No more rabbits!

      2. You wouldn’t want to eat the rabbits around my place. We have Jack Rabbits, and they not only have very little meat, but the meat is tough, gamey to the extreme, AND wormy. Those cute little cottontails are pretty wormy too.

        1. I used to hunt and eat jackrabbits regularly. 20 minutes of parboiling before you cook them as you would a store bought rabbit and they’re tender and non gamy.

    2. Sorry Sixpense..What is a boxtrap? I can’t help it, I’m English.

      I have however got a brilliant veg garden and a neighbour that thinks it good to feed a wild rabbit.EEEEKKK

      Any Help? Anybody? I Know, it’s not good to kill ‘A fluffy rabbit’ but it’s my hard work that will go to pot , so any help out there?

      1. Lizzie, can you fence off your yard so the rabbit can’t get in?

        also,

        someone told me used coffee grounds, make a line of them around plants/garden.

        also, pretty sure there are some plants the rabbits really hate/smell of.
        try asking at a garden centre/google.

      2. I used to plant basil plants between my tomatoes plants that seemed keep a lot of traffic away including most tomato worms.

    1. Never seen a guard dog that didn’t need to sleep? And besides, rabbits are much smarter than a dog! Rabbits do practice OPSEC, they know where those secret passages are located, hole in the fence, dip under the fence, and when the dog is out doing his business.

  2. I have seen my guineas alarming about and chasing the wild rabbits. I have not seen a rabbit on my property in about 3 months but I have seen them at the neighbors. The Guineas do not like anything that doesn’t “belong” and boy will they throw a fit about it. They also do double duty and eat the bugs that attack gardens also. My suggestion (If you do not live in the city) is get some Guineas!

  3. The wire fencing works well, but there is an easier way to use it besides burying (if your garden is big, you would have to do an awful lot of digging to bury the wire). Use 4′ wire, fold it so one side is 30″ and the other is 18″, put the 30″ side as fence with the 18″ side laying flat on the ground on the outside of the garden. If you have grass around the garden the wire will disappear into the grass, if dirt just cover the wire with mulch so it doesn’t show. You may have to pin the wire to keep it flat on the ground. This works because the animal doesn’t think to back up from the fence to start digging, they just try right at the fence. I use this method to prevent animals from digging into my chicken pen.

    I’ve also heard that urine works–dilute it 1/1 and spray on the soil. I’ve not tried it, so I don’t know how well it works.

    1. Thanks for the fence tip Tammy, great idea not having to dig a trench!

      1. I’ve had to come up with alternative methods in a lot of things because I simply cannot physically do things in the ordinary way anymore. Digging trenches is not an option, unless I have unlimited time to finish (such as the trench I dug to run electricity and water out to my chicken coop, took 6 months to complete). I can still dig post holes and put up fencing, only because I have a post hole digger, using a shovel is too awkward in a sitting position.

        1. I think it’s amazing all that you are able to do in a wheelchair. So many people probably just give up any activity, but it sounds like you keep yourself plenty active. Good for you!

        2. You might be surprised at what a person who uses a manual wheelchair can do. We have terrific upper body strength from wheeling our chairs around. I can beat my husband arm wrestling (he uses an electric chair), and my younger brother has refused to arm wrestle me any more because it embarrasses him to lose, LOL.
          I AM able to walk some, like from my house to the shed to get the scooter out, but if I use my legs very much one day, they are useless the next two days.

          My $68 SSI check says I’m Disabled, but I bet I’m more active than a lot of able bodied people.

    2. Tammy used the perimeter urine marking …….to my surprise it kept the deer and coons away, but not the rabbits. On the bottom of my chicken fence I had many used pieces of old galvanized water pipe, I installed the pipe about 8” in the ground around the entire perimeter and used bailing wire to attach the fence to the pipe, after which I used crushed rock to cover it up and after ten years I have never had anything get in or out.

  4. I’m sorry but I couldn’t help but find the order of the posts to be funny. You had BEWARE THE PALE HORSE then BUNNIES!!!

    1. LOL, yes, sometimes my subject material varies WIDELY (while still within the realm of survival, preparedness, or situational awareness of current events affecting our freedom and liberty).

      Although ‘doom’ articles get more ‘page views’ and while the articles are valid with varying degrees of importance, immediacy, and impact, I can’t do it (doom) all the time – it can become somewhat depressing after awhile, and I don’t want the website to be stereotyped as purely alarmist… Diversification is a better approach in my opinion. Sometimes it’s good to pull back and examine other practical issues at hand, like in this case, BUNNIES!! – in your garden.

  5. .22 caliber to the head. Skin, clean, throw in pot with carrots and potatoes…. Solve 2 problems at once…

    1. Actually at least 3 problems solved, including those new furry slippers or gloves you can make!
      Plus use innards in compost,

      Jaz

  6. Let’s think this through. If one suspects that their local rabbit population is typically infested with worms, then would it be wisdom to try to bury them or compost them? NO! That would be creating a vector for disease for your family in NUMEROUS ways. Bad idea.

    Personally, from every composting article I have ever read has stated not to place any meat, organs, bones into compost as it SLOWS down the process of composting.

    Under collapse conditions, I think you’d be missing out on at least some significant loss of meat calories even if they were small. Many species have worms like snails, but when properly cooked result in a food source others might not eat but could enable your tribe to survive.

    Since human urine is practically identical to chemical fertilizer, and since most people don’t have rabbits around to fertilize their gardens (it’s among the best manures to add over Winter to restore nitrogen levels that are used up), then you SHOULD be using human urine even before collapse. The only time it is unsafe is if you have a urinary tract infection (UTI), for urine is sterile unlike fecal matter. Since human urine is a rabbit deterrent and boosts the fertility of the soil, then why not do this?

    On the other hand one should NEVER add human fecal matter to the garden as that could severely impact your tribe’s health. Solid waste must be very scientifically dealt with and typically that process requires three years of specific decay to be rendered safe.

    Human hair is also a rabbit deterrent, and that can easily be added from hair cuts and beard clippings. The former can be freely taken from barber and beauty shops with their permission.+

  7. P.S. There are folks in America who work with rabbit pelts to make delicate items. I personally know one lady who take them to make teddy bears that are a sought after trade item. Everytime she does that work it causes skin irritation. You may encounter that if you end up working with rabbit pelts post-collapse. It does go away after discontinuing that form of work.

  8. I was born in alaska and we had a snare line in the winter. Dad set out a lot od snares, and if he brought in four rabbits, our family of ten had a good supper. We never had rabbits in the summer though, mother said in the summer the rabbits were wormy.

  9. I have a problem rabbit nest I have to get rid of. This giant rabbit has made a burrow underneath our inground pool concrete pad. It’s totally damaging this area and despite our best efforts to keep it away…it’s frantically trying to get back in. I can only assume it has babies in there, but the hole is so deep there’s no way to tell for sure. We’ve decided to let the potential babies grow and leave the nest before trying to seal off the area for good…I just don’t know when that will be. I’d hate to seal them in there!!! When is the best time for me to do this? It’s now end of May, no baby bunnies in sight but we’ve spotted the large (we assume) female. I’d prefer not to harm them, but I really need them gone. They’ve been burrowing in this spot for years I am told by the previous house owner, but I want them gone. Wouldn’t mind them anywhere else in the backyard, but the damage they’re starting to cause in this spot could be $$$ for me. Help!
    P.S. I have a dog, I have a fenced yard, I tried sealing the hole with thick garden plastic liner and dirt, and I don’t want to shoot it or harm it…even thought it’s an a-hole lol.

  10. Taimed rabbits which people left behind when they moved is very selfish. Please take them to a pet shop. We lend a wired trapbox from spca. Dig holes in our garden galore!

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