The Year the Rabbits Ate the Crabapple Trees

Each year, during the winter, and especially during times of inordinant snowfall, the rabbits become desperate for food. If times are desperate, I will buy a bale of something and put it out. We had a group of 8 rabbits, and I would not want them to diminish.

We went through one of these tough seasons, before I had learned to put out a bale of alfalfa. We had these prized crabapple seedlings we were fond of seeing making progress. The rabbits were very hungry and they ate our trees' bark. This kills the trees. All of them were affected. We ended up in the spring cutting all the trees down.

My husband kept saying, "Those D#$%^& rabbits." We considered pulling out the roots, but that seemed like a lot of work. We began to plan the garden around them. I concluded that the rabbits had to be really hungry to have to decide to eat our tree bark. I was not upset. I felt bad, but I also felt bad for the rabbits.

A wonderful thing happened. Two of three trees grew back. The birds planted a seed from one of the first two and gave us a third. I have all my trees back. The trees grew back way more beautiful than the first trees I had planted. They were exceptionally more healthy. Both of these trees are about 20 feet tall. I think this is bigger than the average crabapple tree for the time they have been there. My trees turned into crabapple bushes coming back from the root. When we first bought them from the garden centre, someone had pruned them into a tree. A tree with only 1 trunk is very susceptible to damage, whereas a bush is not. The crabapples are a huge joy in the yard attracting large groups of birds to pop by daily. My husband revised his saying about the rabbits to be, "Thank God for those rabbits."