Confession: I by no means knew what number of animals roamed the night time till I moved right into a home with a yard that was a veritable buffet for mentioned animals.
Raccoons, opossums, skunks, even coyotes and foxes — all of them are widespread sightings in my neighborhood and an actual downside for residents with edible gardens, properly mulched landscapes, or small cats and canines.
As pure scavengers, they emerge after darkish (and even in daylight, on the uncommon event) and start their nightly hunt for meals from trash cans, again porches, garages, and backyard beds.
The latter is my largest gripe, as I’ll often get up to holes throughout my yard — heaps and many holes, a few of them a number of inches deep and over a foot in diameter, the work of relentless raccoons (or opossums or skunks?) looking for grubs within the grime. It’s one factor for them to dig up the mulch within the paths, however fairly one other once they land in a backyard mattress and dig up newly sown seeds or newly transplanted seedlings. Gah! I really feel like my coronary heart’s been ripped out when that occurs.
A nocturnal critter can destroy a complete backyard in a single day, and it’s a shedding battle I wage each season. Till this season.
To this point, I’ve tried nearly each trick within the ebook to repel raccoons: black pepper, scorching pepper, Critter Ridder, predator urine, motion-activated sprinklers, vivid lights, Havahart traps. These metropolis raccoons don’t care. I believe they even sneer in any respect our techniques as they toss apart our seedlings and rake out all of the mulch with their claws.
The one factor that’s labored is putting in fencing round our beds, and for some time, that solved our woes. However our hodgepodge of fencing was removed from excellent: quick, flimsy, worn out, ripped aside (sure, from raccoons), and barely making it to the following season.
I didn’t need to construct a customized fence, however I wanted a better-quality and extra dependable answer that I wouldn’t need to hold repairing or changing. When I discovered this wire border fence from Gardener’s Provide Firm, I made a decision to offer it a shot and the corporate despatched it over for evaluation.
I went with the 26-inch fence, which is excessive sufficient to discourage any animal from digging alongside the sides, however not so excessive that I couldn’t comfortably harvest from the mattress. It’s sturdy, low-maintenance, and straightforward to erect, and I particularly like the way it blends in with the panorama. (The OCD in me desires to Goo Gone all of the stickers on the stakes, however I deserted the thought after I realized we had over two dozen of them. Possibly that’ll be an end-of-season challenge.)
Up to now, I’m actually digging it. (Pun supposed.) We secured the ends with plant clips so we might simply take away the fencing when wanted (for seed-sowing or transplanting), and put in it as a fringe on our raised beds in addition to round particular person crops that we wanted to guard.
Since I’m all the time in search of multipurpose options that make life simpler, I additionally ordered this mesh pest management pop-up and surprise why I didn’t search for it sooner. It’s a game-changer within the backyard.
Birds are our most troublesome guests in the course of the day, as they’ll chow down a complete mattress of lettuce seedlings after we put them out. We thought-about including netting, however this season, we merely positioned the pop-up over our mattress. It took lower than 60 seconds to “set up.” It allows all of the solar and rain our seedlings want whereas defending them on all sides.
We just lately moved the pop-up to a special mattress to guard our brassica seedlings. It’s leaps and bounds higher than the floating row covers I’ve used previously to maintain cabbage white butterflies (and their voracious inexperienced caterpillars) off our crops, and the zippered entries on either side make it simple to entry the crops for fertilizing or harvesting.
We went with the 4×8 pop-up which inserts neatly over most of our customary raised beds, however I want they gave somewhat extra wiggle room on the size for hand-built beds that might not be precise. The pop-up supplies an additional 3 inches general, however I’d’ve appreciated about 6 inches of additional width and size for extra versatility. Nonetheless, we’ve used this on a number of of our 4×8 beds with out difficulty and I like the truth that it may be folded flat and saved for the following use.
The pop-up did include small metallic stakes to safe it to the bottom, however since we had some very heavy storms final month, we tied it off to full-height bamboo stakes to ensure it wouldn’t blow away. After a very gusty day with banana leaves flying throughout, we checked on the pop-up and it was nonetheless pretty much as good as new. It’s so helpful that we might add a pair extra to our backyard to maintain the critters, caterpillars, and birds at bay.
For off-the-shelf fencing options, these are my favorites proper now! Do you may have another tried and true strategies for controlling critters?
Gardener’s Provide Firm offered the merchandise talked about on this publish for evaluation, however all ideas and phrases are my very own. Thanks for supporting the manufacturers that help Backyard Betty.