Rodents are very opportunistic animals. What this means is if they are given access into some place then they will do their best to find any kind of resource that enables them to improve their quality of life. This can mean that your attic can make for a great place to sleep, your trashcan can provide a lot of food, or underneath your house can become a great place to have babies. They are simply looking for the easiest place to locate something that will help them to improve their life.
This is especially true of food. Rodents love to find a place where they can locate a large assortment of food to enable them to survive. This can mean that your garbage can, your pet’s dish, or birdseed you have laid out can become an opportune choice for a meal.
Sadly, one of the areas that rodents will frequently turn to so that they can find food is your garden. Your garden not only provides them with a vast assortment of food that they can eat, but it also gives them fresh food in more ways than you may think. It’s not simply about eating your fruits and vegetables that you grown, but also the many bugs that could be living there eating your fruits and vegetables. The vast majority of rodents will eat these kinds of insects, and so they will not only feast upon the food you are producing but also on the bugs that are present.
Obviously, you don’t want these rodents in your garden. You would like them to be as far away from there as possible. So, how do you keep rodents out of your garden?
The answer is a lot simpler than you may think. First of all, before you go out and start getting all kinds of repellents or buying into ideas of chemicals you can lay around your garden to keep them away, stop! These may sound like a good idea but they’re not.
The number one way for you to keep a rodent out of your garden is to not give them access. This means that you need to create a fence that is at least 3 feet above the ground, and is tightly sealed so not even a mouse could be able to squeeze its way through. In addition, this fence needs to be dug at least a foot below the surface of the ground and buried. What that means is that your total fence height is about 4 feet, with three of those feet being above ground.
Rodents such as possums and raccoons will dig at the ground to try to get underneath your fence to get into the garden. If at least 12 inches of the fence or buried it is nearly impossible for them to have success. In addition, these animals do not jump over fences so 3 feet is sufficient enough to keep them from being able to gain access into your garden. It’s a simple solution, but it works.
Read more:
Rat Control,
Get Rats Out of the Attic,
Rat Trapping,
Rats in the Ceiling,
Rat Feces.