How to Protect Seedlings from Rabbits

If you live anywhere near the country or wildlife AND have a vegetable garden, rabbits are possibly a problem for you.  For me, rabbits most often attack my cabbage seedlings.  It is amazing how quickly they can strip a cabbage plant of all leaves, leaving just the stem.

Luckily, for me, the plants usually recover, but they have so much growth to make up for it seems to take forever for the cabbage head to mature. I get so mad when I have babied my seedlings all winter just to have them turned into rabbit fodder, seemingly, overnight.

In my quest to protect those little seedlings, I've come across a few solutions manufactured just for that purpose.  I've actually considered row cover.  I even have this very one, but I like to look at my plants, and cabbage seedlings only seem to be vulnerable for a short time so the row cover feels unnecessary.

At my local nursery I came across these plant protectors.

It looks like they would work and they're reusable, but I really don't have room for the expense right now.  Instead, I decided to consult my recyclables again.

I dug out several cottage cheese, sour cream and yogurt containers, cut the bottoms off and nestled them down over my cabbage plants.  It's been a week and so far they are working just fine to protect my precious little seedlings.

The beauty of this little endeavor is I can either save the modified containers to use again next year or save space (and the chance of losing them!), recycle them and dig out more next year when it's time.

Anyone else thinking of getting a Beagle JUST to keep the rabbit population down at your place?  :)

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