We planted tiny kale and kohlrabi and cabbage plants in early August. They got a pretty good start, with enough rain and good soil to keep them alive during the hot weeks. We tackled the weeds as they came up, mostly with a tractor, and we didn't pay a lot of attention to those fields. They looked good from a distance.
Recently I went all the way around the Far Yonder field (some of these fields are over 300 feet long so we don't always look at them from both ends) and saw that just over a tiny rise, where we couldn't see what was happening, a groundhog had been mowing down the four beds of kale, systematically. That's how they eat, moving down the row in a very orderly way, eating every plant to the ground. Rabbits are completely disorganized when they eat, popping all over the place biting off the tops of lettuce or baby carrots.
As some of you already know, I have an unorthodox way of discouraging groundhogs. I have given up on asking people to kill them for me. More groundhogs just move in when a nicely placed hole opens up. You have to make the hole unappealing, even if it is right on the edge of a delicious field.
I have two methods—I often dump a lot of rotting vegetables down the hole because I know that groundhogs are meticulously clean, so this would probably upset them. I do this repeatedly for days. If I don't have easy access to the hole (like, it's in Loudoun and I am in Vienna most of the time), then I stuff the hole full of sticks, making it impossible to enter and exit. Over the next few days, the groundhog will dig its way out. In the meantime, the kale will start to grow back. If I manage to stay focused, dumping garbage or stuffing in rocks and sticks, eventually the groundhogs move. The location has become completely unappealing—stinky and inaccessible.
Right now I am monitoring a big groundhog hole in the furthest western part of our Loudoun farm and also an area that I call "the condo" at our Vienna farm. Both of these are right next to the kale. The kale isn't dead yet, it is just chewed to the ground. In a few weeks, it will be growing well again, if I do my job right.
Last week I chased a big fat groundhog out of the radishes, following him all the way to the trail that went underneath the deer fence. I let him know that I know where he lives. Since then I have been watching that radish patch and no one has taken a bite in a week. That big rodent didn't like getting yelled at. Once I actually crawled underneath all the prickly underbrush to tackle that particular hole, but I am not young and agile and I didn't want to do that again. This time I just scolded, and it worked well enough.
Most people think this method is ridiculous, but if you aren't willing to kill your adversaries, then you have to be willing to be persistent in your eco-terrorist efforts. I don't need them to die, I just want them to move.
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