Attracting rabbits to my garden

Who is crazy to want more wild rabbits milling about in their garden? Me.
By garden, I mean the frozen patch under snow and ice that isn't exactly producing growies this time of year. A little while ago I was taking notice of how the snow really points out all the evidence of cottontails in the area: tracks,stripped apple tree prunings, urine spots, poo pellets...Poo pellets everywhere! They are ammending my garden for me! I also occasionally live trap them, because as some of us out there know, they are quite delicious. I harvest them and yet the poo continues to deposit itself on the garden.
Now, I also raise domestic rabbits for meat on a small scale, and I must admit, I am rather terrible at it. My animal husbandry skills are abysmal and the amount of energy that I have put into them is several orders of magnitude greater than anything I have ever gotten out of it. With a fraction of the feed I use on domestics, I believe I could "direct" the wild population to key areas to better harness all that wild manure, and draw them to my trap for more consistent meat harvesting. Perhaps, I could abandon my domestics altogether and repurpose the rabbitry for something more productive...a greenhouse perhaps.
Has anyone else successfully harnessed this resource that otherwise is considered a scourge by most other gardeners?

My rabbit-in-residence suggests planting chicory. Of all the different leafy winter greens I have in the garden, that seems to get nibbled the most.

When we had a rabbit we let roam the yard, it always zoomed into any patch of a white spring/early summer wildflower. http://www.illinoiswildflowers.info/weeds/plants/hdg_parsley.htm I'm pretty sure it was this one.

She liked the whole plant at any stage, including the dried stalks and seeds. Very invasive if you have the conditions for it, but easy to identify and pull if needed. She had been a solely pellet fed rabbit before we had her and this plant was one of the big turning points in teaching her to graze in the yard.

I mostly coexist peacefully with wild rabbits in my yard. They mostly leave my growies alone, I think mostly because I have a ton of clover growing in my yard. That seems to be their favorite. I also have a pretty significant number of blackberry brambles surrounding my property that seems to keep them safe from all the would-be bunny eaters.

Did I mention that ALL of my young trees have chicken wire cages around them, otherwise I would have eaten a lot of bunny stew by now

Lazlo Rose wrote:I think mostly because I have a ton of clover growing in my yard. That seems to be their favorite.)

I've heard this also and that rabbits were never such a problem in the garden before weed killers when lawns were of mixed species, clover and weeds - not mono culture grass.

Plant the same thing for wild rabbits you should have for your domestics.....swedes, purple top turnips, grazing kales and rapes, etc. Tall cover crop medium red clover withstands freezes well. I'm still trimming laid over clover long ago frozen in my whiskey barrels to provide supplemental feed for rabbits being hauled across frozen stockpiled mixed grass, clover and forb yard when the snow is a little to deep or crusty to get it all raked off.

Would you like to learn how to manage your rabbits for better results? I used to kill 3,000 a summer, but now only produce a few hundred pounds for our family and a few friends.

In my "great white hunter" phase(not much of a pheasant hunter), I came across
an area along a railroad tracks that was covered in rabbit tirds. I knew there must
be a couple dozen of them, but all my hunting turned up none.
.
Several years down
the road my wife wants to get a niece a baby rabbit. Well after shelling out nearly a
hundred dollars for all the stuff that goes with a baby rabbit; cage, feed, water bottle
etc., my wife decides she wants a baby rabbit too. Another hundred dollars and now
I am in charge of cleaning the cage of a rabbit that no one can hold because it is a
biter. From cleaning the cage on a less than a weekly schedule, I can tell you one
rabbit poops alot, did I say "a lot"? A poop load.
.
If you want to encourage rabbits, I would suggest having a cage full of female
domesticated in the center of your garden/fertilize zone. Breeding like rabbits
isn't just a cute term, don't ask me how to tell a male from a female rabbit though.