Groundhog Trimmer

Perhaps the groundhog can trim my forsythia bushes while he’s in there eating the leaves.

Did you know groundhogs climb bushes and even trees to eat the leaves? Mulberry is a real favorite. Here’s a groundhog from two years ago when I’d left a sampling mulberry in the garden until I could manage to cut it down completely. This little buddy made a party of that spray of branches on the top!

Here’s the tree he climbed.

And last year, after I’d cut that one down, another young groundhog climbed my “recumbent” mulberry, one that laid down on the ground during a snowstorm a few years ago. That made all but the branch tips fair game!

He was after this little cluster of leaves, which he finished in one minute, literally, by the time stamps on my camera.

Then he had his eye on the ones farther on the branch, but he was too heavy to go there. See all those bare branches? Yes, he ate them all.

I took the above four photos through my screen door. The photo below is when I went out onto the deck and he decided to high-tail it out of there. Well, as high as his tail could go.

Those trees are coming down, and many of the forsythias will be dug up and given away. We’ll see what he does next!

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