Critter Control

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Critter Control

Techniques for protecting your garden from furry and feathered visitors.



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While sharing the outdoors with animal inhabitants can make your outdoor experiences more interesting, sometimes the damage they wreak can be too much for a landscape to bear.

Four basic control methods can be used to minimize damage.

1. Modify the habitat. When you remove the food source, cover, or other attractions for animal pests, they're likely to go elsewhere.
2. Employ scare tactics. Scare tactics can include a domestic dog or cat prowling around the property, visual imitations of predators, sounds, and shiny pie plates.
3. Block 'em with barriers. Barriers can include fencing and netting to control animal access.
4. Repel their sense of smell. Try commercially made repellents or make homemade varieties such as soap bars, human hair, and pepper sprays.

Here are 8 common pests and suggestions on how to control them.

Birds
Scare birds off with fake predators like snakes or owls during the peak season. Or you can distract them by planting mulberries. You can also protect crops with bird netting.

Deer
You can scare deer away with a dog (or the scent of one) or repellents like soap, human hair, or hot sauce. You may even want to resort to electric fencing. Conventional fencing is another option, but deer can jump high, so it will have to be at least 8 feet tall.

Chipmunks
Dogs, cats and repellents can help deter chipmunks, too. Castor oil spray is a repellent that works on these small guys. Underground barriers such as wire mesh or hardware cloth around bulbs and new plantings can prevent access to your plants.

Mice and Voles
Besides the barriers and repellents mentioned above, protect your trees in winter by wrapping the trunks in hardware cloth and burying the ends in the soil. Keep the mulch layer thin near tree trunks so mice or voles won't have a place to hide.

Moles
You can simply try to eliminate their food supply—grubs—by applying milky spore disease or parasitic nematodes on your lawn.

Rabbits
Besides dogs and repellents, put up a chicken wire fence around your vegetable bed, or use hardware cloth barriers around vulnerable shrubs and tree trunks.

Skunks
Control the number of beetle grubs in your lawn by applying milky spore disease or parasitic nematodes.

Woodchucks or Groundhogs
The mere scent of a dog can do the trick, so place dog hair or carpet squares that your dog has slept on around your garden.

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