How to Control Major Garden Pests

A creature that's nonexistent or harmless in one place can be a major nuisance in another. The following culprits, though, seem to cause big trouble everywhere. Here are some environment-friendly ways to reduce their damage.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Rabbits

1. Get a ferret (a first-class rabbit-chaser) or beg some ferret droppings from a pet shop or ferret-owning friend, and ****ter the droppings around your plants.

2. Plant repellent species in and around the rabbits' targets. Good choices include Mexican marigolds, dusty miller, garlic and onions.

3. Fill 1-gallon (4-l) glass bottles with water and set them among your plants. Sunlight bouncing off the glass will startle the bunnies and send them fleeing.

4. Fill cloth pouches with cat, dog or human hair and ****ter them among your plants.

Deer

5. Your only guaranteed protection is a solid fence that's at least 8 feet (2.5 m) high.

6. To discourage deer, hang or spread any of these around the garden: human or dog hair, blood meal, baby powder, bars of deodorant soap, dirty laundry or shoes, evidence of natural predators (call a zoo and ask if they'll give you hair, urine or feces of a lion, tiger or cougar).

7. Spray susceptible plants with a commercial product such as Hinder, an organic formula made from fatty acid soaps.

8. Protect young trees by wrapping the trunks with hardware cloth or a plastic spiral tree protector (available at garden centers).

9. Replace the deer's favorite food with plants they don't like. For a complete list, consult a book on deer control, but try any of these for starters: Annuals: snapdragon, sweet alyssum, stock, nasturtium, nicotiana, wax begonias, zinnia. Perennials: yarrow, monkshood, foxglove, lavender, coneflower, peonies, iris. Trees and shrubs: bottlebrush buckeye, shadblow, red osier dogwood, spruce, pine, northern red oak, rugosa rose, American holly, Sawara false cypress, Japanese pieris.

10. Surround your garden with a triple-deep hedge of arborvitaes, which deer love. They'll flock to it and forgo your other plants.

Slugs and Cutworms

11. Slugs: Water in the morning instead of evening; the soil will dry by nightfall, depriving the slugs of needed moisture when they come out to feed. Studies have shown this method to be as effective as classic trap-and-destroy techniques--reducing slug damage by up to 80 percent. Provide habitat for predators such as toads, birds, turtles and salamanders. Erect minifences of copper stripping around your planting beds. Just make sure you get all the slugs out of the area before you put up the fences; otherwise, you'll trap the pests inside.

12. Cutworms: Mix moistened bran with molasses and BTK (Bacillus thuringiensis var. kurstaki ), available from garden centers and catalogs. Sprinkle the mixture over the soil about a week before you plant. You won't kill off all the cutworms this way, but you will reduce the population. Install a protective collar (1 inch/2.5 cm aboveground, 1 inch/2.5 cm below) around each seedling or transplant. Good collar makings include aluminum foil, paper-towel rolls and juice-concentrate cans. Encourage predators, especially toads and birds.

13. Plant dill, alyssum, yarrow or cosmos to encourage parasitic wasps, which prey on cutworm larvae.

Moles

14. Remove their food supply, grubs, by inoculating your lawn with milky spore disease (available at garden centers).

15. Walk over the tunnels to flatten them; this often encourages the moles to go elsewhere.

16. Find a tunnel that seems to be a main route and poke holes in it with a stick. Then pour in a castor oil-based repellent such as MoleMed. Or make your own by combining 1 cup (8 fl oz/250 ml) water, 3 fl oz (80 ml) castor oil and 4 tbsp. dishwashing liquid. Then add 2 tbsp. of this mixture to 1 gallon (4 l) water.

Groundhogs, aka woodchucks

17. Get a dog. Jack Russell terriers are famed groundhog hunters, but any canine, aka large or small, will send the rodents packing.

18. Borrow the scent of someone else's dog: Give a friend's pooch some old towels or blanket scraps to lie on, then ****ter them around the garden. Replace the bedding often to keep the aroma fresh and scary.

19. Empty the contents of your cat's litter box into the tunnel entrance. You may need to repeat the process several times, but eventually the groundhog will get discouraged and move out. Then fill up the entrance and exit holes with rocks to keep out newcomers.

20. Erect a welded-wire fence that extends 4 feet (120 cm) aboveground and 2 feet (60 cm) below. Bend the top foot (30 cm) of wire outward to form a baffle.

[SunflowerOcity]

on 10/19/2007 Good Stuff! See also: http://www.ehow.com/how_2094685_control-garden-pests-naturally.html

[ferretsforlife]

on 8/2/2007 PLEASE DO NOT GET A FERRET TO CHASE RABBITS FROM THE GARDEN, THEY WILL JUST RUN INTO THE ROAD OR SIMPLY DISSAPEAR. THEY ARE NOT CHEAP, NOR IS THIS WHAT THEY ARE ABOUT. FERRETS ARE VERY PERSONAL ANIMALS THAT NEED TO BE INDOORS, KEPT IN PAIRS AND LOVE TO BOND AND HAVE 3-4 HOURS DAILY OUT OF CAGE PLAYTIME WITH THEIR LOVING HUMAN PERSONS. PLEASE RE-THINK ABOUT GETTING A FERRET TO GO RABBIT CHASING, OPT FOR SOME OF THE WAY BETTER IDEAS OFFERD ON EHOW. THANKS

on 11/22/2005 Ground black pepper sprinkled around the ant's entry point is a great deterrent, is not very costly and will not harm plants or other animals.

on 11/22/2005 Believe it or not, human urine works great to discourage other animals from sharing the same space! I have done wildlife rescue for many years and human urine works especially well for squirrels in the attic to groundhogs in the garden to moles in your yard. My physician-sister-in-law stuffed a dirty diaper in the groundhog hole to get rid of him and he moved on without violence or too many hard feelings! It also works EXTREMELY well for gophers!

Yes, this sounds utterly insane, but it works. We had problems with gophers and my M.I.T. Professor/Dr. husband would literally "go" out, very late at night in our secluded (thankfully) backyard and mark his own territory atop the open mounds where the gophers were. It took about 4-6 consistent tries, and then we noticed that they were popping up in everyone else's yards...but not ours!

For less noticeably down-to-earth deterrents, try cotton balls soaked with ammonia on a plate. Ammonia is another natural deterrent, and it's cheap!

on 11/22/2005 An alternative to applying smell or taste deterrents is to use smart electronic devices to detect intruders and repel them with audible sound, ultrasonic sound, light or even the movement of spraying water.

Consumer rated products in this space can be researched at
http://www.scatmat.com/Tools/SolutionFinder/pet_control_solution_finder.asp