I want to plant a vegetable garden in my backyard, but there are a ton of rabbits in the neighborhood. Instead of enclosing my entire raised bed(s), it seems like it could be simpler to just make the entire backyard impregnable to bunnies.
Is this feasible? What are my options to accomplish this? If I staple some chicken wire or nail some plywood in the areas with gaps between the wood and the ground will that be enough?
Because rabbits can dig, and don't jump very high, usually a 3' wide chicken wire, with the lowest third buried, held up by wooden stakes is enough to keep them away. I do this around raised beds in city gardens for folks, and it works as long as there's nothing to climb over, cause some rabbits learn to climb. It's also important that this fence be strong enough that even a large rabbit cannot push it over, because that's also a possibility.
In your yard, I'd do similar, except yeah, staple it to the fence, but still bury it to a depth to prevent digging.
One "trick" for a more dig-resistant fence is to bury the wire down and out. So if you go down a foot, also go out a foot, and bend the bottom of the wire out a foot. If the animal would dig deeper than a foot, but starts near the fence, they hit the buried horizontal wire. Of course, even with galvanized wire, rust never sleeps, so you may have to do it over eventually.
My final solution to have a small vegetable garden that will not be dug up by .quirrels, chipmunks, or rabbits, is to build approximately 2' x 4' raised beds of 'bullet' blocks. I top it with a cedar frame covered in 1/2 wire. As the plants grow, I put on a 6" or 10" cedar sidewall around it. Finally, there is the 2' tall critter cage. Any wood, including cedar, in contact with the ground will be attacked by termites within a few months, here in the south. I will have a total of 12 of these beds. The size allows me to reach every part of the bed and the structures are not too big and heavy to handle or store.
