Year of the Rabbit

You might think that the depths of winter would be fairly quiet on the destructive-animal-pest front in the garden. There isn't anything growing at this time of year for them to eat, after all.

It was such a beautiful morning here that I decided it was time to bring the greenhouse out of its winter hibernation mode and sow some seeds in there. The soil was warm, dry, and teeming with centipedes. Mike reconnected the water supply and I got to work, sowing carrots, beets, rocket, spinach and some lettuce and pak choi seeds in one of the beds. The dead-looking leaves in the corners are last year's parsley plants, which don't look very lively at the moment, but should burst back into abundant growth soon.

We had some high winds last week which blew out one of the small panels in the corner of the greenhouse.

I hadn't really given it a lot of thought, apart from adding it to the mental 'tasks to be done' list. The panel is nowhere to be found, so it's going to be a case of finding something suitable to plug the gap.

What I hadn't considered is that this gives a handy entrance to the greenhouse for winter-starved creatures. When I started watering one of the other beds, evidence of their activity was all too clear:

They'd been feasting on the last of my over-wintered carrots:

So suddenly it's become quite a priority to get that entrance hole fixed. Otherwise word will spread that I'm running a nice little rabbit restaurant and the plants from all the seeds I sowed this morning will be feeding Flopsy, Mopsy, Peter and Cotton-tail instead of us.

Sometimes I think Mr McGregor got a bad rap.