Groundhogs… Again

Every Spring I start my garden with some peas, both shelling and snow. I use the shelling peas in the Winter for soups and stews. The snow peas are gobbled up as soon as I can pick them.

This ritual is very satisfying, mostly because peas grow fast and you get that immediate gardening joy of success. Their flowers have a fresh scent and the pea pods follow shortly, unless you have groundhogs.

Now we have caught groundhogs before. Trapped them in a have a heart, drove them several miles away and let them go, easy enough. This year our neighborhood groundhogs decided to have babies under my front porch, 6 babies to be exact. The biggest litter possible, of course.

How did I discover this very large litter of baby groundhogs? They were in my garden of course, munching on all my peas! These little guys were so small, they ducked under my electric fence and squeezed through the metal garden fence without any resistance.

I actually had to walk right up to these little guys and shoo them away before they thought to scamper back under the front porch. They didn’t fear me at all, too young I guess. So once again my husband got out the trap. We waited a couple weeks until we were pretty sure they were ok without Mom, and then trapped them one by one.

We were careful to drop them off at the same location, hoping they would find each other again. As they grow, they will go off on their own and build their own burrow to raise a family in, just not in my backyard 😉