Introduction
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.
Instructions
Rabbits
Steps
Step One
Get a ferret (a first-class rabbit-chaser) or beg some ferret droppings from a pet shop or ferret-owning friend, and scatter the droppings around your plants.
Step Two
Plant repellent species in and around the rabbits' targets. Good choices include Mexican marigolds, dusty miller, garlic and onions.
Step Three
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.
Step Four
Fill cloth pouches with cat, dog or human hair and scatter them among your plants.
Deer
Steps
Step One
Your only guaranteed protection is a solid fence that's at least 8 feet (2.5 m) high.
Step Two
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).
Step Three
Spray susceptible plants with a commercial product such as Hinder, an organic formula made from fatty acid soaps.
Step Four
Protect young trees by wrapping the trunks with hardware cloth or a plastic spiral tree protector (available at garden centers).
Step Five
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.
Step Six
Surround your garden with a triple-deep hedge of arborvitaes, which deer love. They'll flock to it and forgo your other plants.
Slugs
Steps
Step One
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.
Step Two
Provide habitat for predators such as toads, birds, turtles and salamanders.
Step Three
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.
Moles
Steps
Step One
Remove their food supply, grubs, by inoculating your lawn with milky spore disease (available at garden centers).
Step Two
Walk over the tunnels to flatten them; this often encourages the moles to go elsewhere.
Step Three
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.
Cutworms
Steps
Step One
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.
Step Two
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.
Step Three
Encourage predators, especially toads and birds.
Step Four
Plant dill, alyssum, yarrow or cosmos to encourage parasitic wasps, which prey on cutworm larvae.
Groundhogs, aka woodchucks
Steps
Step One
Get a dog. Jack Russell terriers are famed groundhog hunters, but any canine, aka large or small, will send the rodents packing.
Step Two
Borrow the scent of someone else's dog: Give a friend's pooch some old towels or blanket scraps to lie on, then scatter them around the garden. Replace the bedding often to keep the aroma fresh and scary.
Step Three
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.
Step Four
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.
