How to keep animals out of your garden
Most of us love to watch wildlife, but not inside our garden for sure. It is a frustrating whether it your neighbor’s pet or some other kind of wildlife in your garden. Your first motive will be to keep the animals out of your garden because nobody likes to go for picking fresh produce from garden be it flowers or vegetables and find it eaten by some culprits. The critters might have eaten some of your ripest and juiciest pieces. You don’t want chipmunks or deer to eat your garden, but don’t want also to hurt the animals. So here are few ways to keep these critters away:
- Building fence around your garden beds: it is one of the most effective solutions to keep the animals out of your garden. You can either fence around the individual beds or around the entire garden, it all depends on the size of your garden and the types of fencing you want to do. You can include either poultry wire, or bamboo as materials for fencing but it should be at least 15 cm under the ground to prevent burrowing animals.
- Raised beds and narrow pathways between the beds: raised beds are the simplest to build and have enormous advantages. It can keep your soil warmer and few animals are really reluctant to leave ground level and enter the beds, hence it’s an added advantage of keeping the animal aloof. Try to keep the distance between the beds as wide as 30 cm, not more than that. The narrow pathways scare the small animals.
- Interplant variety of plants with each other: by doing inter planting you can keep the soil disease free and healthy. It also deters the predators. Few plants like garlic, onion, chives marigold and lavender repel rabbits, deer and few other animals. You can create a perimeter of animal repellant vegetables around your other vulnerable crops to protect them from these bandit animals.
- Do additional mulching: most of the animals are reluctant to walk over mulched areas, so you can use straws, dried evergreen needles or wood bark as mulching material.
- Tying strings: you can tie aluminum cans or pie plates with string and tie them around you garden. The shiny metal and the noise usually scare the animal.
- Home remedies to deter cats and raccoons: you can use orange and lemon peels to prevent cats entering your garden. A spray bottle with water and hot sauce deters the raccoons.
But remember there is no reason to poison them, persistent humane methods works!
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