Pointing The Way

Rusty may be an Australian Shepherd, but he seems to think he's a pointer. He was pointing at three rabbits at the back of our garden. I can guarantee you that every muscle in his body was tense. After a couple of more steps, he charged. He didn't come close to catching any of the rabbits, but after a shout from Jo and I, he did stay inside the garden instead of chasing the rabbits off into the woods.

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Pointing The Way

Garden 2009: Cottontail Rabbit

Eastern Cottontail (Sylvilagus floridanus), one of our little garden helpers.

Monday, 8/10/09:

The day was mostly sunny until our afternoon walk time (4:00 PM) when thunderstorms started moving through our area. Scattered thunderstorms roamed for the following twelve hours or so. No severe storm passed over us. We ended up getting only .8"/2cm of rain. After the first couple of lines passed through, no rain fell for a couple of hours. We took the dogs for a walk up to the gate and Jo picked 9 pounds/.5Kg of green beans.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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Garden 2009: Cottontail Rabbit

Garden 2009: Green Beans and Climbing Rabbits

Our first picking of green beans should occur later today or maybe tomorrow.  If we want to harvest any green beans, we must grow them inside a welded wire enclosure. Otherwise, the rabbits would eat them down to the ground.

The wire hoops really aren't quite large enough for the beans, so they send stems and leaves out through the mesh. In the past, the cottontails have done a very good job of keeping the ground level protruding stems and leaves trimmed back to the wire. This year, the rabbits took their trimming duties one step farther. At least one member of our local rabbit population learned how to either climb the wire or jump up on top of it. We've seen a rabbit sitting up on top of the wire hoops several times. And you can see there are few stems and leaves left sticking outside of the wire. Unfortunately, I seriously doubt we'll ever be able to get close enough to photograph the rabbit in action.

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Garden 2009: Green Beans and Climbing Rabbits