Sounds like a good plan to me, canokie. We have predators for the rabbits including the local cat population, hawks, foxes and feral dogs. For now, I have a big enough garden to feed the rabbits, too. My biggest problem is squirrels who went through all my sunflower seed in the green house and insist upon planting trees where I don't want them. Of course, I wasn't smart enough bring the seed inside or to store it properly. They did this even though the dog food and alfalfa pellets were readily accessible. These tree rats are in my attic, too.

Your locale is unique and only you can determine what will work best, mainly through trial and error. The hardware cloth beneath the beds, if I understand correctly, probably isn't necessary for rabbits but will do a great job in eliminating moles and voles. Sounds like those rabbits are pretty hungry. I'd bet the moles and voles are, too, if you have them. If you don't, after a few seasons, they'll find it. Sometimes the rabbits don't come into my garden because there is a thicket nearby with unkempt growth that provides them with their customary diet. Only in winter do they seem to invade. Their population will likely grow thanks to my helpfulness in feeding them the Austrian peas which snap back in growth after they've been mowed down by the rabbits. Population increase is the problem I'm having with the squirrels and i'm the catalyst.

Congratulations on your setup. I'd love to afford that. No jealousy implied. I think it's awesome. I hope to get some cattle panels this year for my beans. I hope I can get enough to provide a tunnel for raised trellises for my pumpkins. gourds and luffas. I use my established old chain link fence as a natural trellis, but I struggle with the johnson grass up along the fence lines.

Be flexible. never know what you'll need in the end.

bon

Thanks, Bon! I appreciate the feedback. The cost is a hurdle for me too and I'm still trying to tweak it a bit to lower the cost. I may have to do this in stages - put in some of the beds now, and more later I think I will also cannibalize the 5 raised beds I already have by taking them apart, cutting them to fit, and putting them back together. The wood is surprisingly solid yet and I think it will last a few more years. Its mostly the ends of the boards that are splitting and I'll need to trim those anyway to make them fit the new layout. That will help quite a bit as its the 2"x12" boards that are the most expensive.

I hope the voles don't move in! Maybe I should put the hardware cloth on the bottom now, so I don't have to tear everything up later?

Far better than to tear it up later? Dunno if you're gonna have voles or moles, but better safe than sorry.

This looks really nice. You did a great job!

Voles aren't always a problem. We moved here in 1999 and had a great hunter cat---a young male domestic shorthair named Moose who killed gophers, moles, voles and field mice and brought his kills to us to proudly show off. In fact, he'd bring them through the dog door in the laundry room, take them into the walk-in pantry and line them up on the floor. I can laugh about it now, but I was really irritated when he first started bringing dead rodent type animals into the house. We got rid of the dog door ASAP. I sure do miss him now.

We didn't start developing an actual vole problem inside the garden, as far as I know, until the drought of 2011, so even though our woods are full of pine voles, they stayed away from the adjacent garden for many years, even after Moose went to kitty cat heaven. You might get lucky and not have a vole problem at all, so why not wait and see if one develops? The first couple of years, I was hoping that after the drought ended, the voles would go back to the woods and stay there, but by then it seems they had developed a real affection for potatoes, sweet potatoes and carrots, as well as the roots of many flowers, fruit trees and some legumes. I just used a castor oil-based mole/gopher repellent to repel them, reapplying it after heavy rainfall, and didn't start lining new raised beds with hardware cloth until they decided to stay in the garden and eat potatoes. I think that was the summer of 2013, which also is the year they started eating the roots of our fig trees. Even now, only two raised beds (one for potatoes and one for sweet potatoes) are lined with hardware cloth because that's all they really bother in the front garden. I'd like to get the bed where I raise onions some years lined with hardware cloth as well, but the thought of digging out all the soil in a bed that is 200 square feet is daunting, given that rain has been falling regularly all autumn and all winter long and we have been muddy nonstop. I don't mind digging dry soil, but I'm not touching the well-amended clay while it is wet. Even well-amended clay is still clay and if you dig it wet you're going to get clods when it dries. And, if I am ever to rotate root crops with other items, I'll have to line other beds with hardware cloth. I know I should do them all, but I hate disturbing the soil by digging it up if I don't have to, so maybe I'll just wait and see if the voles become more of a problem. or if they don't.

I don't know if voles will bother onions. I've left the perennial onions and the garlic in beds all winter that aren't lined with hardware cloth and nothing's ever bothered them.

Have you had voles show up at all yet or are you trying to guess what happens next?

Gophers popped up out of the sandy soil areas around Thackerville these last couple of weeks. In some places they are so horrible----I don't think you could walk through the area with gopher mounds without stepping on a mound----they are that numerous and that close together. I don't know how anyone down there has a garden or farm crop at all with all those gophers, but there are some successful farmers and quite a few successful gardeners (and tons of ranchers) down there. We never had moles or gophers come back here after Moose wiped them out well over a decade ago.

In the back garden, the voles went on a tear and started eating southern pea plant ones, one plant per night for several weeks. There are no raised beds back there as that is a newer garden plot, and I never intended to build raised beds in its sandier soil. I'm contemplating turning most of it into a forest garden, with the fruit tree and berry bramble roots enclosed in gopher cages to help keep the voles from eating them before those plants can become established. It would be easier to plant perennial plants back there with root protection than to fight the voles with annual plants every year. It isn't the original plan I had for that area, but may end up being the best use for that space.

The truth is that no matter how hard we try, we're always going to have wild creatures working hard to get into our gardens. I just plant enough extra plants (going for that lush, overcrowded look) that the wild things can get a few plants and it isn't the end of the world. I like watching the wildlife that shares this land with us----I'd just rather not have them take more than their share of our crops.

Bon, We sow a little winter rye grass seed here and there most years (some years we overseed the entire lawn area with it, though more for fire protection than to provide rabbit food) and the bunnies visit it every evening and every morning. We let it get tall and lush for them in winter and they even wear out little bunny trails as they travel to and from their favorite spots to feed. They also eat the clover that we grow behind the barn, as well as some of the winter weeds that pop up here and there in the yard and pastures/meadows. If we had incredibly harsh cold weather that browns out all the green winter grasses/forbs, I just put out little piles of hen scratch for them at night.

The down side to ensuring that the rabbits are well-fed is that other animals then show up to prey upon them, but that is life in every ecosystem----everybody/everything eats something and everybody/everything is eaten by something. Sometimes the Food Web is cruel.

What are the predators of voles? Snakes?

When I turned the dirt in my planter the other day I noticed overwintered carrot stubs that had been eaten.

Yes, and bobcats as well as domestic felines, small dogs like rat terriers, and probably hawks. My son has a theory that we always had voles but that I didn't know it because the bobcats hopped the 4' fence at night and did a little hunting. He also feels this way because he often would see a bobcat in the garden in broad daylight when he drove up the driveway when he was in high school and in college. He'd come strolling in the house and say "Mom, there's a bobcat in our garden but none of our pet cats are out there" because he knew the word bobcat would send me outside to find our pets and bring them in. After we raised the garden fence to the height of 8' to keep out the deer, the vole problem appeared a couple of years later, so his premise could be valid. It also seems like my snake problem within the garden (or right at the garden gate) has skyrocketed the last few years, and maybe that is because we haven't had open access for bobcats to control the voles so the voles are attracting the snakes.

This winter, I've left the garden gates open 24/7 in the hopes that bobcats are visiting and finding and eating voles. I worried the deer would go into the garden and eat my perennial flowers and vegetables, but so far they haven't. I will have to start closing up the gates soon though in order to protect volunteer flowers and herbs that start sprouting about this time of year.

That makes a lot of sense. I'd be inclined to let them in, occasionally, too. I'm fortunate to have so much space. We don't have bobcats, but plenty of feral and loose cats. If these hanging around this spring stick around I hope I can get them neutered. I won't bother unless they stick around for a year or more. Most that come through here have homes and are on the prowl.

Canokie, the beds look very nice. One thing you may want to think about when you start getting old like me, is to make some type of hook, or nail to support the panels on the post so you only have to lift the panel an inch or so to free it from the post. I am unable to lift my panels high, but I can lift them a foot or so to hang them on a nail or hook. Another problem I run into is having plants trying to grow through and around the panels.

I really like the idea of the hardware cloth to keep out the critters, but I have more trouble with deer than I do with small critters. I hauled another dead dear off yesterday morning, a car hit it and it was laying near my driveway.

Larry

Thanks Larry! Funny you mentioned lifting the panels, because I am already getting a bit tired of having to lift those panels so high, plus the ends tend to catch on each other going up, especially since when I cut the panels in half, that left half of the panels with prongs sticking out at one end.

I was thinking I might use fence panels all along the bottom to make a channel to keep the dogs from pushing the panels in or pulling them out. Then having some kind of hook like you mentioned or latch at the top to hold them upright.

That is why I wanted to build two of these beds and live with them for a bit to work out the kinks so to speak. I've also decided, after looking at the budget (!) to reuse the boards from my 5 existing beds to build 5 of the new beds. The wood is surprisingly solid yet and should last a few more years.

Bon, We have feral cats around and every so often one of them adopts us, gives up the feral life and moves in to live with us. Yellow Cat did that about 8 or 10 years ago. He had roamed our rural area for about a decade before that. He first tried to adopt Fred's family, but then Fred adopted a dog someone had dumped along his road and Yellow Cat moved to our house because he didn't like that dog. There are so many folks here with barns and outbuildings that need a good mouser that most feral cats can find work, and an occasional dish of food as well as a warm bed in a barn or shop building if they just help out with rodent control.

Feral dogs are a more serious issue. Lots of idiots dump their no-longer-wanted dogs in "the country" as if the dogs can somehow instantly understand how to hunt down and kill their own food and fend for themselves. Usually, instead, the feral dogs go after someone's puppies, kittens, kids, lambs, chicks, calves or foals and find themselves on the wrong end of a flying piece of lead. Tim and I both have had unpleasant encounters lately (within the last week) with feral pit bulls. We try to just run off feral dogs, but if they keep coming back to attack us or our animals, we have to do something about it. I'd say feral dogs are a worse problem than all the forms of wildlife combined, except maybe for the venomous snakes, and I say that coming off the worst timber rattler year ever so all those snake encounters last summer are first and foremost on my mind. My worst coyote encounter ever was from a hybrid that looked like it had one coyote parent and one golden retriever parent. My friend, Jesse, had warned me about how dangerous this particular animal that was roaming our neighborhood could be, so I was very cautious when I encountered it while out walking my dogs. I saw it often that summer, but after that initial encounter, it never tried to get too close again.

Larry, I hate it when a deer is killed in the road in front of our house. We call our dog, Jet, the ghost whisperer because he will not cross a spot in the road where a wild animal died.....even 10 years later. We joke that he is communicating with their spirits.It makes him hard to walk because he will just sit down and refuse to go across the spot where a wild animal died years and years ago.....you have to cross the street or skirt around it in some other way to appease him.

You must have a busy deer crossing near you. We have one right about halfway between our driveway and the neighbor's driveway, which probably is about a tenth of a mile up the road. There's also a copperhead crossing right there by his driveway. For years and years it has been the frequent scene of dead copperhead snakes run over in the road, year in and year out.

Canokie, We reuse stuff like lumber over and over again until it cannot be reused any more, and then we throw it on the compost pile and compost it and reuse it one more time.

Dawn

Bill says hardware cloth is cheap, so I'll be getting some. I probably won't be able to line the bottom of the planter until mid summer or fall, even, but he'll buy me some. He just bought a new toy - an expensive one - and he's antsy. So, he's buying me little things I need out of self-imposed guilt. I'm like DUDE, you're working. Bills are paid. Just buy it... but I get a new comal (tortilla press) and other things. I hafta be careful what I say I want or he'll just haul off and buy it. lol

So, I assume 1/2" is sufficient or do I need to go down to 1/4"?

The owls were hooting like crazy. Truly, I find their mating season extremely annoying BUT they're predators of small creepy things, so I don't complain. The planter is up front where the hawks and the owls probably won't dare to venture. Never know, tho.

We use the 1/4" galvanized hardware cloth and the one we buy is not cheap according to my Frugal Yankee husband. The one we buy usually is 4' wide and 100' long. Now, if you are buying only a small piece, like the 2' wide x 5' long roll, that one probably is not too expensive. We use the 1/4" because the 1/2" did not prevent them from eating fruit trees ". So far the 1/4" has kept them out of raised beds lined with it. It is going to take us forever to dig out all the soil by hand and line each raised bed but that's okay. If I tried to do them all in one year, the sticker shock for buying hundreds of feet of the hardware cloth might be too much for Tim . I should add that he hates fencing and hates spending money on fencing of any kind.

Okay. For now, I only need my small planter so I can load up with carrots. Thanks to you, I recognize I can just plant hordes of root crops out in the garden if it ever need be. You know.. enough for us, enough for critters and enough for weather.