It takes months of careful planning to lay out my garden. Figuring out how many jars we want to can for the next year is one of the first big problems. We started with a couple of dozen mason jars 15 years ago, and today … over a thousand.
But today is the moment we’ve been planning and preparing for all year. We are beginning to see the fruits of our labor.
It was a rough start for the beans though. We had to replant bush beans three times because of wildlife. Homegrown canned green beans are my personal favorite. Unfortunately, the young plants are a delicacy for rabbits, and the rabbits this year are simply out of control.
I don’t remember any other year where the rabbits were this plentiful or this big. My oldest son has become quite proficient with his pellet gun, eliminating them. But most years, it’s only a couple. Now, it’s a couple a day and they just keep coming out of the woodwork.
So, I began investigating and my curiosity led me down a deep path that I could never have predicted. For instance, I learned that female rabbits are fertile nearly every day of the month, except three. Once mated with a male rabbit, the fertile egg will produce a litter of baby rabbits in about a month. And they can get pregnant within minutes of delivering their babies.
I’m astounded by this information; nature continues to amaze me. But the best part is that scientists used rabbits for testing and development of the drug Viagra. Given their reproductive habits, I’m not sure that the rabbits had anything to gain from the drug.
After researching all of this, the only thing I can conclude is that we have either created, by accident, a honeymoon suite for rabbits. Or, we have accidentally grown a Viagra plant that the rabbit community is coming for.
We will continue to find ways to deter them, but there is no doubt that this year we have a serious rabbit problem. And they are bigger than ever.
They were used as a meat source for a lot of people until the 1950s. I read somewhere that rabbits were a common dinner for families, as common as chicken. I’m not sure if I want to raise them on the homestead for a meat source, but it appears very practical.
Despite all the problems we’ve had with them, we were able to harvest our first green beans. If they didn’t taste so darn good, it wouldn’t make any sense to do all of this work. We managed to can 65 quarts on the first harvest and there will be so many more over the next month.
Next, we’ll be harvesting the carrots and tomatoes. The tomatoes that were started just a few months ago have grown to be bigger than a large blueberry bush. The stems are bigger than my thumb. This is what all the work we’ve been doing is about: harvesting.
