Some people have mice and voles that eat their crops. I have . . . a one-year-old human who keeps trying to gnaw on my squashes that are being stored for winter, and who recently chowed down on a bunch of my squash seeds. (Ones Iād saved myself and had plenty of, thankfully!)
I was reflecting that the big rocks in our soil might help to deter digging pests, and Iām wondering if thatās why we donāt seem to have any. Itās also possible the feral cats in our neighborhood help. Iām pretty sure they keep down the mice (and the birds).
So this isnāt a question that strongly affects me, but I bet it affects many of you.
What do you do about animal pests? What helps you garden successfully when theyāre around?
My garden is going in with sheep fence around it. So the deer are less likely to be in there alot but they do still go over it easily. The only decently level area also happens to be within the sheep pasture. So hoping having the sheep rotation going on around it will help deter their interest.
There is plenty of critters here though. Coon, possum, skunk, groundhog, vole, mole, mouse, rat,ā¦ Iām having war with the rats. There is a neighbor that Iāll leave it as unkempt and overtaken with too many chickens and any other bird they come home withā¦ ahemā¦ Anyhow the rats have extended from what I consider to be a source and they are a huge pain. I thought I was going to break an ankle in the barn when the dirt collapsed a rat tunnel. Iām trying every trap known to manā¦
Last year I only really got the tomatoes in and the escapee chickens were my biggest problem with them. Escape and scratch up every little piece of mulch in the rows and lost a third of the plants in a few days after transplanting
Guess weāll see what tries to thwart me this year
Same as with insect pests - - intervention by deterrent only, and usually nothing.
Our grapes came in this year. I wasnāt sure how heavily predated theyād be, so I put some of those little nylon produce bags from the store (from limes and such that we had bought) on them to protect them. We had surprisingly few takers on the grapes - - I donāt know if this is because weāre down the road from a creek where wild grapes grow abundantly or not.
Also had sorghum and barley. For these I chased off birds when I saw them gnoshing on them earlier in the season. Post-harvest I let them do their thing (we left a lot of sorghum for the fall and winter).
Our yard is fenced. Critters can still get in - - possums, moles, squirrels, a āmoving carpet of furā my wife and her friend are almost certain was a wolverine one time. Deer canāt get in. If they did, more deterrents and different plantings. The dogs would also chase them off.
Weāre fortunate as beginning gardeners to have the luxury not to depend on our crops heavily for food. If we make mistakes, try to push the envelope too far on crop stress, have our corn gotten into by varmints or our kale demolished by cabbage loopers, itās OK.
Somebody mentioned Gabe Brown recently in another thread - - he is a big inspiration to me. I think itās best to let a growing place integrate with the surrounding ecosystem and let that ecosystem manage itself. Cabbage loopers completely destroyed whatever brassica we grew in the back of the garden last year (I think kale?). We grew kale again in this year. The looper pressure still arrived - - eventually - - but we had plenty of time to harvest.
Some sort of tunneling varmint is all in the raised beds since at least a year ago. They dig all around. Some of our plants are growing their roots into these tunnels. Sometimes plants vanish. We still get a harvest. Maybe weāll put out some humane traps some day and take them to a suitable wild place. Maybe weāll leave them be and let our home keep getting wilder.
If you watch the big little farm youāll see they had serious problems with animal and plant pests early on. Over time things integrated and balanced with the neighboring ecosystem. My sense is this is a common story.
Rabbits and deer are fenced out and sometimes shot, squirrels are trapped and generally released or sometimes shot. Chipmunks are trapped and always released because they are so cute. Coons are trapped and shot, or preferably just shot, so I donāt have to clean up the trap afterwards and because I just donāt like coons. Birds, especially cardinals have become more of issue on grapes and strawberries. They can also be trapped and removed; cardinals are really stupid birds. Iāve trained the neighborās dog to dig up moles, she thinks it great fun.
Repeated pep talks with the coyotes and bobcats were not effective, there just isnāt enough of them. Owls and hawks do help out some. Snakes, lizards, frogs and toads help some too but can be a little too indiscriminate, frogs will eat bumblebees and Iām not ok with that. Snakes found in the garden pond or near a bird house are captured and removed.
Apparently burrowing pests donāt like horseradish. I would make a slurry of the whole plant and dump it on the gopher mounds. I also poured it around plants I didnāt want them digging up, and used it to disrupt their tunneling pattern.
It usually took a week or two of this to be rid of them for the season. I was just starting to test growing it around vulnerable plants when I moved.
It wasnāt invasive there because it was so dry. I had four patches, but they stayed close to the water source. I am uncertain about letting it grow here.
I use deer fence around all my gardens. In the smallest garden I have raised boxes with hardware cloth underneath to keep out gophers and mice. The boxes are tall and have worked well for about ten years. I have had to refurbish them some as the bottoms of the boxes have rotted some and the gophers got in. These 4 x 8 boxes are very productive and provide plenty for our small household of two.
My plots in the community garden are also fenced. The gophers and voles are a big problem. I have found they donāt bother corn, squash and runner beans that much so I am focusing on those crops. I built two boxes with wire underneath, but they are not as tall as the boxes in my other garden, and the mice and gophers have climber in from the top! I may try making them taller.
An unforeseen problem is that they have also tunneled under the boxes and are nesting there. So, now I will try various things to get them to leave: gassing them with dry ice/Co2, peppermint oil, hot Chile powder around the openings. What we really need is snake habitat and snakes, neighborhood cats, and more hawks. May try a taller predator perch as the one we have may be too short to attract them.
I used to trap and kill gophers but can no longer tolerate the times when they get caught by a leg and die terrible deaths of pain and suffering and thirst. Creating a garden that attracts wildlife and then killing the wildlife you have attracted seems like poor choice. Keeping wildlife out with fencing or providing habitat for natural predators seems like a better way to go.
Those all sound like really good ideas. I have a sister in a neighborhood with an insane number of squirrels, and she says they eat everything. They ate her Halloween pumpkin (it wasnāt even carved yet ā it was whole!) within twelve hours of her putting it outside.
I asked if she could put a cage around any cucurbits she grew, and she said, āSquirrels can dig.ā
So now Iām wondering if a cage over top of a fruit, with a big wooden board underneath, would work to protect a watermelon or squash or whatever.
Have any of you tried that? Do you think it would work?
I put mesh around my young tree trunks to protect them from voles. Any roots Iām trying to overwinter would need to come in overwinter, instead of being left in the garden (beets, carrots, etc). I accept that some branches on berry bushes will be stripped of bark every year and will resprout.
My dogs and cats do some work: the dogs keep moose and deer and bears off the trees in their respective problematic seasons; the cats (and ravens, owls, etc) reduce the number of free-roaming rodents. My one little red squirrel eats enough chicken food that he doesnāt go for my garden, and I guess any additional squirrels donāt have the skills to avoid getting picked off by ravens/eagles/coyotes/foxes since Iāve only ever seen the one.
Dogs, cats, ducks, and geese are kept out of the annual garden by a fence; in winter the fence is taken down.
I learned the hard way that my ducks love horseradish and comfrey and will actually eat them down into the ground and kill the plants(!!) so theyāre fenced out of those areas except for brief periods of time and when thereās enough protective snow.
I have done a pretty good job of fencing the rabbits out and a fair job at keeping the deer out. However the gophers, pack rats, chipmunks, squirrels, ground mice eat HUGE chunks of my garden every year.
Back when I lived in the city I had a big problem with rats they burrow all through my garden but I found that planning a plant called mole plant they stopped digging and eventually for the most part left but after a while I have one family of rats that the mold plant roots didnāt bother and they multiplied and I had nothing to work against them theyāre all plant isnāt poisonous itās supposedly just unpalatable
Rats, rabbits, hares and mice are the main ground dwelling pests. Newly planted trees or newly emerged tree seedlings are protected from these until they are no longer of interest. The cat does what he can but he can only eat so many. Perhaps more cats!
Kangaroos are a problem only in as much as they cause damage and thankfully they arenāt in this area in numbers.
Feral deer are a problem elsewhere and I guess theyāll reach this area eventually but so far so good.
The aerial beasties are the main nuisance. Little silvereyes love nibbling on ripening fruit but they never seem to be in large numbers. All things parrot-like are the worst. The larger ones (galahs, sulphur crested cockatoos, corellas etc) will tear open apples, pears, quinces just for the seeds. They move in large flocks so can demolish an entire treeās crop in short order. The smaller types (eastern rosellas, king parrots etc) love stone fruit but happily they only move around in pairs so damage isnāt too bad.
What do we do about them? Apart from netting every tree (there are too many for that to be worthwhile) thereās little we can do apart from timely harvest.
I know someone whose entire garden got wrecked by deer. He was mad and waited for them to return the following night. He killed 4 of them.
This guy is a deer killing expert black belt at highest level. Heās absolutely obsessed. He said once they get a taste for your garden, itās game over for you.
Unfortunately, he hauled them off into the woods to get picked by buzzards. I would have harvested the meat in exchange for the vegetables lost and then buried their remains in the garden. I see it as victory because deer meat is more valuable to me than lettuce or something. Plus, I would get to wear the ācompost your enemiesā t-shirt and feel proud of myself.
So it sounds like you probably donāt want late-hanging apples, the kind that are best left on the tree until January or February. Early ripening ones are likely a smart choice.
I wonder if Arkansas Black would be a good fit? Itās supposed to be hard as a rock and immune to bug damage during the time itās on the tree. When you harvest it, itās still unpalatable. It finishes ripening in storage, and becomes delicious after at least a month indoors on the shelf. More parrot-proof than most cultivars, maybe?
Yes, I definitely think harvesting the meat to make up for lost plants is the best solution to dealing with animal pests. That way you still eat, one way or the other.
Itās okay to feed the local scavengers instead, though. I mean, carrion-eating birds do provide valuable ecosystem services (their guts kill pathogens!), and they deserve to eat, too.
Still, I would definitely consider it more efficient and a better use of resources to eat them myself.
Since we donāt eat meat, Iāve wondered how much mammal I can reasonably feed to a flock of chickens. Or maybe can as cat food, but that sounds like it would take a lot more gross handling and processing.
Another possibility is, you could ask people in your area if theyād be interested in being given some free meat if they come collect it from you while itās fresh and do all the processing. You may have neighbors whoād be delighted to eat it.
I also had a neighbor who raised chickens next door and a colony of rats developed under her chicken coop. They were eating the chicken feed she so thoughtfully provided them. The colony grew quite large and eventually she figured out the source of the problem but for awhile it was rat city in my garden and they really ate a lot of my plants.
Rats are perhaps the very worst of pests. Smart, tough, vicious and adaptable, they are also serious disease reservoirs. Cats donāt help much because your average cat is too smart to try to take on an adult rat which is a formidable adversary. One possibility, which may not appeal to the more sensitive folks out there, would be to get a dog particularly a rat terrier and encourage the dog to follow its instincts. The whole reason why terriers exist is that originally they were used for the very necessary purpose of controlling rats. They are good at it.
I didnāt even know rat terriers existed! Thatās a very usable piece of information to know. Thank you!
I wonder ā would it be possible to get a python that was big enough to eat rats, and not big enough to eat chickens, and keep it in the chicken coop until all the rats were gone? Or would any python big enough to eat the rats also be a danger to the chickens?
We had a volunteer rubber boa in our back yard last year, and I was delighted to hear that they love eating mice, and they never get big enough to threaten pets or humans. Given what you said about rats being aggressive, though, Iām guessing a snake that can eat them would need to grow larger than a typical harmless-to-humans-and-livestock wild snake would.
(Ones Iād saved myself and had plenty of, thankfully!)
(Laugh.)