Natural pest control, rodent edition

Pests. I don’t mean your kid brother, although he may qualify in the strictest sense. I mean smaller pests, such as mice who enter your house and decide to stay for tea and crackers, and squirrels who nibble on the fruits of your hard work in the garden.  What can you do to keep them out?

Mice are a tricky sort.  Their bodies compress more than you could imagine and they can fit into holes you never thought they could use for travel.  Our neighborhood has a veritable nation of mice, perhaps with their own flag, and so more than once we’ve had some unwelcome house guests when, for example, the basement door was left open. The most basic method of prevention of course is making sure they never get inside, and in our case that meant never leaving the basement door open and unattended and either plugging up holes in the house near the ground with steel wool or fixing them with concrete. Mice won’t dig or chew through steel wool but of course you have to make sure the steel wool will stay in place.  An actual repair is better, if you can swing it.

But what do you do when they’re inside and you’re not keen on glue traps, snap traps, or poison?  The first mouse who came here to live decided it didn’t like the electronic sonic repeller I plugged in and decided to  leave, but the subsequent mice haven’t paid it any mind. Live traps often worked well, if they’re the bigger size.  I found that greasy corn chips worked better than the usual recommendation of peanut butter or cheese.  You’ll probably have to figure out what floats your unwelcome houseguests’ boats, whether that’s peanut butter, crackers, corn chips, or caviar.  Caviar is clearly not the frugal option. You can also buy natural mouse repellent, but a cheaper solution is to use some cotton balls and the active ingredients of the repellent. Those happen to be peppermint and spearmint essential oils. In a pinch, peppermint oil by itself may work, but the combination of the two works better.  Put a couple of drops on each cotton ball and put 2-3 cotton balls in hidden spaces in each room.  My suspicion is that the smell makes them feel ill, so consider leaving a mint-free trail outside, if you can figure out where the hole to outside is.  This isn’t a viable option if you’re allergic to either oil, and keep in mind your house will smell like toothpaste for a few days.  That’s better than having mice, at least to most of us.

Squirrels are a different matter most of the time. Usually you want to keep them away from your garden instead of out of your house, but controlling any aspect of the environment outside presents some challenges.  I usually do the following:  I plant marigolds wherever I don’t want squirrels, namely in my deck planter with my herbs and in my flower bed with my vegetables, and I use garlic-scented pellets and cayenne pepper in the dirt, both of which I have to refresh quite often. And then when these methods aren’t perfect, I give in a little bit.  On my deck there is a small built-in container off to the side.  I put deer corn in it.  I get the deer corn at Menards, which is a local home improvement store like Home Depot, but you can also get deer corn at Cabelas or most stores that sell hunting supplies.  Of all the things I’ve tried, that seems to have the most success.  The squirrels apparently think it’s delicious and don’t bother with much else when they’re helping themselves to deer corn.

There’s a plethora of information about pest control of the creepy-crawly kind.  I don’t have much experience with that, so when I post about that, it will be an assimilation of research rather than my own anecdotes.