I get the blues when the days are short, and it's too cold to be in the garden. I don't let myself get too excited about gardening, but this year, I'm gardening by going through my pics from different times of the past season, looking for pics of specific flowers for my blog. Usually, I have dreams about gardening a couple times a month, but have only had one so far. Maybe it's because of the blogging. We have melting snow today, as it's currently a warm 50 degrees. I am always excited when the days start getting longer instead of shorter. I feel that I can survive the winter, and hope for the soil to be dry enough the end of February to plant my first lettuce, spinach, radishes, and kale. I figure that I want to get out while I can, and if it rains or snows later, it's OK, because those seeds are in there, ready to grow when the conditions are right. I have had seedlings get snowed on, and still survive. Besides, I am already planting more when I see they are up. I have a plan to put a tomato plant or two in my new flower bed, and try to keep the leaves from touching the dirt, because mine always get diseased and die, and I don't have room in the veggie garden to rotate them well. I have some holes to fill in different beds, including the area by our repaired shed. I plan to put in some not too tall growing goldenrods, coneflowers, asters, and some kind of summer blooming annuals. Sue

For those believing that rabbit food (with or without NaCl) is inferior to pure alfalfa meal, I claim balderdash. I get bunny 16 from blue seal, the contents are listed on the label. My bag contains; dehydrated alfalfa meal, wheat middlings, wheat, flour, soybean hulls and meal, molasses some salt and various beneficial nutrients and minerals. All of these are a great amendment and fertilizer for one's soil. The majority is alfalfa meal, and the remainder used to provide a well rounded nutritional meal that growing (reproducing?) bunnies need. Many will claim that soybean meal gives you the biggest bang for the buck, as it is high in protein. If you are thinking in terms on NPK and need to be providing the lawn with lots of N2 to keep it green; I agree. In my experience, nothing works better at providing a quick and long lasting greenup like Soybean meal. With that said, other amendments like alfalfa, corn, sewer sludge, compost, leaves, grass clippings, etc. provide other valuable carbon, fiber, enzyme, amino acid, mineral and vitamin sources for your soil. If you are working on building OM, increasing the microherb and balancing/building the soil, these should be in your repertoire. Your goal here should be to build the soil and all of the feeds above have a unique role in doing so. Over time an organic lawn feed with a variety of sources and properly maintained (mulching all materials in place, water and mowing properly, etc.) will require less amendments and water to stay green as the soil improves. This is the holy grail of what we are trying to accomplish here. There is more to life than alfalfa or soybean meal; diversity is the spice of life, Corn for fungus, alfalfa for root growth, soybean for quick nitrogen, milorganite for iron, CGM for pre-M, milk for red fungus, etc.. Finally, I must address the salt is this is well known to be a bad thing for lawns. All you have to do is look at the first 2-3 feet of lawn that abuts a heavily salted road in New England (or other states with lots of snow) to see the damage that tonÂs of salt plowed into a relatively small area of lawn can do. In my experience bunny food contains ~1% of salt. At 10 lbs/1000 ft^2, that is about 2 ounces or 12 teaspoons per 1000 ft^2. In a plot 1 ft^2, that is equivalent to ~ 1/100th of a teaspoon. Yes that is a small number and microbes actually require a slightly saline environment. It is all good!!

There are a lot of rabbit repellents on the market. Things such as Liquid Fence do work, but you have to keep renewing them. Rabbits don't generally do any harm to turf grass. Flower gardens are where they do their damage. The rabbit pellets are an excellent fertilizer. I wish I had a source of large quantities of it that didn't have timothy hay in it. I don't think that rabbit urine will harm your grass either. I have large areas of blue grass and lots of rabbits. I don't find dead spots in the lawn. Aside from repellents, I know of no other solution other than fencing them out or shooting them.

I saw a live rabbit out in the back last night about 8p. It was so bright out there, with snow everywhere, and I was at the kitchen sink looking out and there he was big as life, sitting on one of my raised vegetable beds. So, whatever is making a meal out of rabbits hasn't gotten all of them. They're just waiting for the garden to start growing again. Guess I'm going to have to make keeping them away my biggest priority this year. We had one side of our fence newly installed last year and they didn't install it close to the ground on a few panels. So now there are plenty of places to get under. Plus my gates are too high off the ground too. I'm trying to decide a solution for that, since I'm really not up to digging a trench all along the fence line and installing chicken wire or something under the ground. I did see this product online called Dig Defense. Looks like a horizontal metal bar with spikes vertically, sort of like a comb looks, only metal. And you pound those into the ground under the fence to meet the bottom of the panel. I haven't checked how much they cost, but would be easier than digging, if my heavy soil is not a problem. That won't help under the gates though.