Marge
Sometimes when we describe the fence we had made people ask, “Why did you need it to go down a foot underground?”. Well, this is the answer to that question, Marge.
We discovered Marge last Spring. She would chomp on the veggies in the old gardens beds accasionaly but wasn’t a huge menace. She lives under our shed, and also has a few other escape hatches around the garden (and I suspect, 1 in the neighbor’s garden as well). As animal lovers, we decided we didn’t want to try and get rid of her, but figure out how to live with her. So the new fence is built to keep her from going over, below, or through. We also feed her any cuttings and extra veggies we don’t need, which she is quite happy with. She has a bit of carrot I gave her in her mouth in the photo above.
Last season she had 2 babies, at least that we saw. We were happy to see her re-emerge a few weeks ago, very skinny, from hibernation. We fed her a lot when she first re-emerged and has fattened up quite a bit. We also spotted a couple of other groundhogs visit, which I assume were males looking for a mate, so we’re hoping she is going to have some more cute babies shortly. I’ll post photos if and when she does.