Blonde Ambition

I buy plants the way I buy wine. By the creativity of the label.

When I saw a blue grama grass called 'Blonde Ambition' I had to have it. The name. And it turned out to be quite an attractive plant. It's a low, bushy grass with stems that have eyelash shapes atop them. They bounce in a light breeze.

When the eyelash flowers go to seed, the plant is attractive in its blonde stage, tawny and still full and bouncy. This is a great plant, even into winter. So I was pretty discouraged to see how slow this was to start up this spring. 

So slow. Nothing to even see well into late June. Where are the bouncy eyelashes? Where is even a hint of stems growing? It's green and healthy but not doing anything. Well, I found out why. I spotted a wascally wabbit out there in the gravel chomping on it.

Apparently he'd been eating it down all spring but I hadn't caught him in the act til the middle of June. He's a little thing, and only seems to have an appetite for this one grass clump, although he's taken down some emerging sunflower plants by the garage wall too. 

In my old garden back east, we had what Jim called dinner rabbits, and they were huge and nibbled everything. So I'm used to battling rabbit damage. My go-to deterrent is hot pepper sprinkled on the target plants, which irritates and discourages the rabbit diners. 

Luckily we live in New Mexico. We have hot red chile pepper. We have a lot of it. Enough to spare for sprinkling on a grass clump.