Update: Last night as I was watering my squash I thought I saw something moving: that something was a groundhog!! It had attempted to get my largest butternut and had already eaten the leaves and young fruit of one cucumber bush. I switched the hose to 'jet' and let him have it. It went leaping across the grass and out of the yard through a hole which has been left open in the east fence because of a tree. I don't think I can close it but are ground hogs smart? Will he realize that he is not welcome and stay away? There are lots of things for him to eat like fallen apples and other berries. UUGGHH!!

It looks like a big nasty front tooth chomped down on your pretty melon! My vote is it's the groundhog. We have terrible groundhog problems. Chicken wire works if you anchor it to the ground VERY securely. Our clever critters eventually found a way under it. I took off the chicken wire backing up our field fencing. I then strung some electric wire (2" tape type cuz I had it around) about 3-4" from the ground in front of the field fence. I used 6" extenders. I hooked up a powerful charger (one I used when we had our longhair Scottish Highland steers). So far, no groundhogs in the garden (no rabbits or squirrels either except one day the charger wasn't working). I still see the groundhogs under the apple tree making a dash to hide under the chicken house when I go out so I know they're still around. We had so many we had to resort to the unthinkable. Now we just have a couple. For years we just lived and let live. They went forth and multiplied until we had to take drastic measures.

Pam, Ever since the year I was visited at/near the fenced garden by 2 different cougars (the second one was smaller than the first, so obviously wasn't the same one) about six weeks apart, I have tried to remember every morning to take a gun out to the garden with me. I haven't seen a cougar on our near our property since then, but neighbors have spotted them on their property and on ours, so even thoug it is an uncommon occurrence, the fact that it occurred at all has made me much more cautious. Those two occurrences were not my first encounters with cougars, but they were the first ones that were so close, and certainly the first time they were in our yard while a human was out there. The majority of our wildlife issues come from venomous snakes, coons (which prey upon chickens like mad), skunks, bobcats and coyotes. We see lots of other wildlife, but they generally steer clear of us. The foxes, for example, seem shy and not especially happy to be seen so they'll run away when they see us. We hear feral pigs more than we see them, though we have had them on our property occasionally. We live in a bend of the Red River near the TX border with Texas to our west, south and east. There is a lot of wild, river bottom land, on those three sides of us and some of the bottom land is Wildlife Management Area, so there is a huge amount of wildlife here. I expected wildlife before we moved here. What we got is wildlife, wildlife, wildlife, wildlife, wildlife. For example, I knew ringtail cats existed but never had seen them in the wild until we moved here. I don't see them often, and when I do, I'm not happy to see them because they're generally trying to get into the chicken run or chicken coop, but I'm still always just amazed to see them. Last year, we got almost 79" of rain and had repeatedly flooding over and over again. The Red River even swept away a few homes that had been near it for over 50 years and never had been flooded before. The river bottom lands were flooded for months. Consequently, the wildlife was driven to higher ground.....and guess where we live? On the higher ground they were seeking. We had so many snakes, and so many huge ones much larger than what we normally see, especially broad-banded copperheads (so I am guessing they really stay in the bottom lands most of the time). I am hoping for a more normal year this year, but doubt we will get it. We had snakes out in January and February, which is incredibly rare, because we just weren't cold enough. I've already had enough snake encounters this year to make me a nervous wreck. Living here would be just about perfect if we didn't have all the venomous snakes. Being visited by a skunk, a possum and a stray dog in broad daylight all within a few hours, was disconcerting to say the least. Days like that are why I am exceptionally careful to close and latch the garden gate behind me. I don't want to be trapped in a garden with an 8' tall fence and with wildlife that might be dangerous. It also is the reason our two separate fenced gardens have two gates each---a main gate that gets used daily and a back gate on the opposite side of the garden in case something comes in the main gate and a person needs to escape quickly from the garden to avoid it. Normally, we assume all skunks out in broad daylight are rabid and shoot them, but if I had shot that one, the garden and I would have smelled strongly of skunk for days. I don't like shooting one so close to the house if we can just follow it 50 or 100 yards and shoot it. I hate to shoot possums, so was relieved when this one ran off. Possums are predators of venomous snakes, so I try to just leave them alone when they are out. It had been a rainy night for two consecutive nights, so I felt like maybe they were hunting for food because of those two rainy nights/days. Stray dogs are, sadly, a dime a dozen here as people commonly dump them in the country all the time. Most stray dogs form packs and begin preying upon foals, calves, kids, etc. and then the ranchers shoot them. Everyone who lives around us has taken in more dogs than they need or want, but we all could have 100 times the number we do have because so many sorry excuses for human beings dump them all the time. The same is true of feral cats, but feral cats prey more upon wildlife than farm and ranch animals, so people have more toleration for them and generally either ignore them or trap them and try to tame them at least enough to turn them into semi-feral barn cats. One surprising benefit of bird netting, by the way, is that apparently snakes cannot see it well or they think they can squeeze through it. We've caught quite a few copperheads that way, though not on purpose. I'd rather the copperhead get hung up in the bird netting before it can bite a person. Last year, as our adult son was bending over to open one of the barn's roll-up doors, a copperhead struck at him, but it got entangled in a piece of bird netting I had left drying on the pavement there, so the snake couldn't reach him, thank goodness. So, while I've never put up bird netting on purpose to catch snakes or to keep them out of certain places, it is a sort of beneficial side effect of using the netting. We wanted to live surrounded by nature. It is one of the reasons we moved to the country. It still is one of the things we love most about living here, but all wildlife is not created equal. I can sit and watch cottontails hop around in the yard or pastures endlessly. Coyotes? Not so much. Dawn

Hi, I'm new here. I have been using the square foot gardening method for the most part the last two years. I started out with four 4'x4' raised beds just off the back patio, then the next year, four 3'x8' beds arranged along the back fence where there was more sun. However, like many of you here, between the rabbits and my son's Jack Russell Terrorist (I mean terrier lol) it was a mess. I tried wrapping 3' high rabbit wire around the beds but the bindweed and everything loved to climb it on the outside, and it was too tall for me to reach over, and not very convenient to remove. I found myself not weeding or harvesting as much because it was such a pain, and that was counterproductive. The next year I drove T posts in each corner and wrapped 2' rabbit fencing around each bed so the fencing started at the top of the raised bed. That solved the problem of weeds climbing up the fencing and made it much easier to trim around the beds, but I still had trouble reaching over. Finally, this year I decided to completely fence in a 12'x16'corner of my yard. I came up with a potager-style design with 2' wide beds all around the perimeter, and a 4'x8' bed in the center. There will be an entrance/gate at one end and a bench at the opposite end, and a walkway all the way around the center bed. The rabbit fencing wraps around the entire garden, supported by 2"x2"s in the corners of the outer raised beds. I'm going to hang cattle panels along the inside of my 6' privacy fence, which forms two sides of my potager, and use that for trellising. Eventually I would like to build an arch over the entrance and an arbor over the bench to provide even more trellising opportunities and make it look more attractive. Even though this new layout is not yet complete, it is already working SO much better! The dog can't get in at all, and neither can the rabbits. Once I get the gate installed, access will be easy and convenient. The bench is a nice place to sit with a glass of iced tea and admire my accomplishments lol! I wish I had done this to start with. Here's a picture - its not finished yet, and the gate is not installed yet, but it will give you some idea. I am still using the square foot gardening method, its just in a different configuration. Shelley Here is a link that might be useful: