What's chopping off the plants?

Greetings everyone!

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It took me a very long time to talk about the plants in my garden, and the reasons are what you're about to read in this account.

Like I had planned out, to make sure that my plants, especially peppers, don't face what I experienced last season, I had the mind to fence each of them individually. It's tedious work, but I just needed to do that because that was the only way I was sure to protect the plants from whatever was cutting them down at night and also to prevent fowls from shaking off or chopping off the flowers when they start blooming.

So, some weeks ago, I created time one evening and got to work. I cut some sticks, dug holes around each of the plants, trimmed an old mosquito net, and used it to fence the plants.

It took me time that evening, and I couldn't finish all of them because I was tired. I decided to leave the remaining ones to be done on another day when I was chanced, and also to use the open space to check if the fencing would work—especially in preventing the animals (which I still don't know) from chopping off the plants.

So, the plants stayed for a week. They were growing well, and I was all smiles before it happened. I woke up one day, went to the garden, and saw branches of the pepper plants chopped off and dropped on the ground. I picked them up to examine if perhaps whatever had cut them struggled before doing that, but no—the cut was sharp, and I was weakened because that was not a fowl, neither was it a goat that did that. What animal is doing that? I thought and thought and thought and pondered but couldn’t arrive at any possible animal that could bypass the coverings and chop off the top branches of the pepper plants.

Well, in that place during nighttime, animals such as pussycats and rabbits usually come out from their hiding spots. Maybe they’re the ones responsible for the acts.

Since the individual fencing didn’t work, I would need to adopt a method of blocking the entrance to the space in such a way that rabbits or any sort of animal cannot enter. I would have loved to set traps to catch whatever animal is doing that, but if I do that, the trap may end up catching the chickens that enter the place often, and that wouldn’t be a nice thing to behold.

Ever since the outbreak happened, I have been sceptical and lazy to get on with the work. Maybe this week, I will do that.

Thanks for reading.

Photos are mine