I’ve worn out 3 break barrel pellet rifles since 1990 on mostly squirrels and some rabbits. As good as chicken IMO. 
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Good to hear a pellet rifle can be useful as well. I do have one of those that I might keep by the door if I manage to attract any bunnies with carrots.
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This time of year up here I can almost guarantee seeing a bunny or two in wild blackberry/raspberry patches. Brambles are a favorite winter food
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These are my opinions so use what you will.
I would not put bait or baited traps anywhere near the area where rabbits are a problem. You dont want to encourage them to come to an area they are already damaging.
It there is snow on the ground, follow the rabbit tracks away from your plants to the heavy cover. Set the trap there.
Rabbits can be hunted with a 22. You can sit quietlyin a clearing near the heavy cover before dusk and shoot any rabbits that come out.
If you have a friend that will go with you during daylight hours, have them step in or otherwise disturb heavy cover/brush piles. Position yourself slightly away with good visibility/shooting lanes. As someone mentioned before rabbits will try to return to their “home”. After running from their cover, they often stop to sense if their predator is pursuing them giving you an opportunity for a shot.
Rabbits like to eat hay/straw in the winter. You can put this food out elsewhere and hope they go there instead. If there is a wild crab apple tree somewhere else, you can chop and drop some branches and hopefully they will go eat that instead as well.
Foxes mostly eat small rodents like mice. Birds of prey eat rabbits and need clearings and high perches when they hunt.
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I think your best bet is going to be to trap them or get a pet bobcat. I had a bobcat chasing one not 10 feet from me just two weeks ago.
Years ago when I had a little garden plot, I had a lot of old tin with nail holes in it 3 foot wide 13 feet long someone had given me . I just tied it to the fence it worked. Meat rabbits are a big business around here.
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When we trapped rabbits for our club we caught most of them on apples with salt sprinkled on the cut apple wedges. Sweet potatoes worked pretty good too but never caught many on carrots. Our club reduced our dues by the number we released on the club grounds.
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Talk to your wildlife officer he might know someone who would trap and release them on hunting land. Some winters we would release more than a hundred on the club grounds. They don’t breed in the winter so you can reduce the population pretty low.
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I think you’re 22 will work fine. However, haven’t really shot my 22 for anything other than tin cans in years. My go to is a single shot 410 break action. I use it for all varmints and snakes. I just got tired of missing with the 22 I don’t miss with the 410
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If you can legally shoot a .22 rifle, then that’s the way to go.
Here it’s illegal to shoot a rifle or pistol. And it’s loud, so I couldn’t get away with it. So instead I use a .17 caliber pellet gun. It has a break barrel so I don’t have to fool with CO2 cartridges. I prefer unleaded ammo so I’m not spreading lead all over the yard; I use the heaviest titanium pellets I can find. These heavy pellets remain sub-sonic, eliminating the “crack” that happens when a supersonic round breaks the sound barrier.
I’ve found rabbits to be just about the most vulnerable of prey. The skin is soft, so penetration is very likely. I’ll shoot up to 30-40 yards, so I prefer a broadside target and I aim at the midline just behind the front shoulder.
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I used to have a rabbit-hunting cat that seriously reduced the population here for a few years, til he got too old to keep it up.
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They like carrot tops, not necessarily carrot roots 
they love clover and clover grows fast. You can essentially make a little pot of clover indoors and set it out where you want them.
They also love strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries as well. I’ve watched them nibble on strawberries hanging off of my pots. They like them fresh btw 
they won’t eat store bought from my experience. Maybe they spray something on store bought that we can’t smell but nothing will eat my store bought strawberries that i throw out into the compost areas.
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Yesterday I found that my cat has been doing better than me at rabbit hunting. He’s started a collection of tails near the hot tub. 
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I used to get up to find a lineup of mouse tails.
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My veggie garden is fenced in, with a trenched in 2 foot lower section with chicken fencing. All my fruit trees have hardware cloth rings around the trunks. This prevents rabbits from doing any damage.
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I finally have proof he’s actually catching them and not just nabbing their tails! (I’ve gotten much better at hitting rabbits with my pellet rifle over the summer, but he may still have more kills than me).
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My rabbit-hunting tabby would bring his kills inside thru the cat door. They were sometimes about as big as he was.
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