Bunny-Proof Lettuce
Bunnies may be cute and fluffy and great starring characters in children’s books, but they are pests when it comes to the garden. Especially when lettuce is involved (although they seem to avail themselves of darn near everything). Your best bet to keep the bunnies at bay is to have a fully clawed and voracious outdoor cat*, but if you aren’t so lucky, then growing your lettuce in raised baskets and pots will work. You can opt for a multi-tiered arrangement like this (which is spectacularly decorative along with being practical and nourishing), or you can tip a big pot upside-down and then put another big pot on top of that, sowing your lettuce in the upper pot. Thankfully, bunnies can’t scramble up the smooth sides of pots.
Store-bought lettuce just can’t come close to home-grown lettuce. It is absolutely worth growing yourself! And it’s a snap to buy a package of seeds — many lettuces come premixed, so you can have a pot of Japanese lettuce greens, tender lettuce greens, “gourmet” lettuce greens, etc. — and then toss them into a pot and lightly cover with good soil. Give them a nice sprinkling of water every day, and you’ll have lettuce in about two weeks. It’ll grow all summer long; just clip off individual leaves whenever you want a salad. I find that my lettuces grow best in partial shade rather than full sun. (Especially with the hot days we’ve been having this summer!) If you don’t have enough pot space to accommodate your seeds, tuck the leftover seeds into a zip-loc bag and stick it in the fridge. Seeing as they’ll still germinate for up to a year after you’ve refrigerated them, whenever you get a fresh pot, you can grow more lettuce. Growing season runs from April through October depending on when the frost falls.
Lettuce truly is the easiest thing to grow, herbs being a close second. As long as you have bunny-proof pots, you’ll be able to enjoy fresh greens whenever you like. They taste great, they look pretty, and their nutrition factor shoots up when they’re ten feet away from your door (zero vitality loss = maximum nutrition). And if you have a pet bunny, you’ll be the best bunny-food provider ever.
Enjoy your fresh greens!
* Although I do not wish to be cruel to animals, I think cats are sublime creatures and I love it when they hunt. The fact that cats leave your garden alone AND protect it AND fertilize it makes them garden gods. I’m also in favor of planting some catnip to reward them for their efforts.
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Tags: anti-bunny, cats, decorative, gardening, greens, lettuce
