In 2012, we moved to a new (old) house in a semi-rural neighborhood with plenty of room to grow a garden while still giving the kids are ginormous outside play area. It’s been a while, so my memory is a bit fuzzy, but I think it was during that first summer here that I worked on digging out grass to create a nice narrow, but long space to grow some tomatoes (amongst other things). For many years, it was a reliable spot and I grew bushels upon bushels of tomatoes.
And then tragedy struck. Well, not really tragedy. More like bunny rabbits. We have one of the few grass backyards in our neighborhood. It’s really like a buffet for bunny rabbits, especially when the only vegetation in other yards is dried up weeds and Russian thistle. At first, it was cute to wake up in the morning and see the rabbits grazing in our yard. Everyone loves a cute bunny rabbit, right?
I loved the cute bunnies until they decided that my little tomato seedlings would be a delicious side dish to their full-course grass meal that we so generously provided to them for free. I was able to scrounge up some tomato plants at the local nursery (it was later in the season) and the really kind lady working at the register told me “You gotta get some chicken to wire to keep those suckers out. They’ll just keep coming back.” So, I bought chicken wire and fence stakes. My garden survived another season and was productive, but it was a giant pain in the ass to climb over the wire (I got snagged a few times) to pick the veggies. We needed a solution, but what would it be?