It often takes a single unwanted little critter to wreak havoc in your beautiful garden that probably took a lot of effort and time to make it look so pleasant.
As much as you love your garden, the chances are that your neighborhood animals have also been eyeing it from afar, trying to come up with ways to enter it.
From rabbits nibbling your colorful vegetables to squirrels digging holes to deer eating away your shrubs, these unwanted animals can make hours of all your hard work disappear within minutes!
With a thriving garden like that, serious animal control is an absolute given.
So, it’s very important for you to keep unwanted animals out of your garden and prevent them from ruining your produce and flowers.
We’ve rounded up some of the most effective ways for keeping intruders away from your garden, critters at bay, and making your garden unattractive to them.
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Use Repellants
One of the easiest methods that will help you keep unwanted animals out of your garden is the use of repellants. You can easily repel them with the help of deterrent scents and plants such as lavender, mint, and other aromatic herbs. You can also make use of repellant sprays that feature hints of pepper or citrus, which are super effective at keeping critters away.
Make sure to follow the label instructions carefully since there are different types of repellants, such as dry granular ones and liquid spray-based, for instance. Each type comes with different directions, so consider reading the label first.
Some natural repellant options you can try include:
- Castor oil
- Garlic clippings
- Predator urine
- Hot pepper extract
Surprise Them
If you are dealing with unwanted animals on a daily basis and it has become too much to deal with, you might want to look into surprising them or scaring them away.
There are many products that will come in handy here, such as motion-activated sprinklers, reflective materials like streamers as well as different noisemaking devices. The idea here is to cause a bit of a scare or surprise to keep the unwanted animals out of your garden.
Eliminate Their Hiding Spots
Oftentimes, a lot of animals such as rabbits and groundhogs create their private hiding spots in different areas in the garden, such as overgrown shrubbery and woodpiles. All you need to do here is eliminate these hiding spots by cleaning up your garden and removing all spaces that have the potential to become secret hideouts for unwanted animals.
Make sure to have neatly trimmed beds and a lot of open spaces in your garden because these two options work really well at keeping small critters like rabbits away.
Create A Barrier
Another solution to keeping animals at bay is to create barriers in your garden so that they are unable to enter inside.
Protect your garden from foraging wildlife by installing proper netting around vulnerable plants to keep squirrels, deer, rabbits, and groundhogs away. You can also use wire cloche or chicken wire instead of netting.
For deer, you must ensure that the fences or barriers are at least 8 feet high. Also, make sure to prevent little animals from nesting beneath garden sheds by closing their openings with the help of hardware cloth or sturdy wire. The ideal way to go about it is to create an ‘L’ shape with the wire and bury it a few inches in the ground. This will help keep the animals from digging.
Use Physical Deterrents
In case things like aromatic herbs and water or dry repellants don’t work, try using physical repellants such as lemon peels, orange peels, and coffee grounds. These work really well for keeping cats away and preventing them from using your garden as a litter box.
Some people also use chopped rose bush branches and place them around the garden, especially the entrance and specific areas they wish to protect. This is quite effective, too, because critters will always avoid stepping over the bushes, thereby keeping them out of your garden.
Remove All Traces Of Food
Sometimes, these intruders enter your garden mainly looking for food and will continue doing that if they find something to eat here and there. So, what you can do here is grow the kind of plants that rabbits and deer are generally known to dislike, which will surely keep them away. At the same time, try to pick and collect edible produce at the earliest as soon as it is ripe to keep groundhogs away.
Fallen fruit and nuts become a feast for squirrels, and the next thing you know, you will find an entire family of squirrels scurrying away in your garden here and there. Pick all such edible food items from your garden to keep them away.
Use Soaps
As strange as this might sound, soaps are an excellent product for keeping squirrels and deer from munching on your garden.
All you need to do is stick a bar of soap on a skewer, for instance, and insert it into the ground around vulnerable plants in your garden. Make sure that the soap is above the plants at a considerable height. Another option is to hang soap bars around the garden by wrapping them in some cloth and attaching them to a rope.
Keep Your Garden Intruder-Free
As you can see, there are so many different methods to keep unwanted animals out of your garden. Many people avoid using fences and artificial repellants like sprinklers and noisemakers, and if you prefer the same, you can opt for natural deterring methods.
There are times when you might have to use a mix of different techniques to ward off intruders, so you can start by testing one or two methods and see which one works best in your garden to keep wildlife and critters away.
