Are you growing a rodent’s dream buffet in your backyard?
Although it’s common knowledge that to beat your enemy in battle, you must first learn to think like them; this principle is often forgotten in the gardening world. The most common problem for gardeners is that in the excitement of planting everything they want, they forget to think of which plants their outdoor companions are silently waiting to devour once they turn their back. You may be unknowingly planting a feast outside that consists of all of your neighborhood rodents’ favorite foods, and they’ll be all too happy to invite the rest of their four-legged family over to finish off your flowers and vegetables before you ever get a chance to enjoy them.
Let’s look at the preferred snacks of rodents, such as rats, mice, voles, squirrels, and groundhogs. This is the first step in long-lasting rodent control.
Rodent Appetites
Rats have perhaps the most voracious appetite of all rodents and don’t eat only from your garbage can. They delight in eating fruits with thin skin that grow close to the ground, especially tomatoes.
Meadow mice, or voles, favor the outdoors and remain close to the ground like reconnaissance soldiers while they forage through your plants and eat little runways through your wild grass. Voles hide safely inside burrows, dig underground, and they delight in consuming your fruits, roots, root vegetables, corn, mushrooms, and bulbs. They would especially love you to plant more delicious vegetation like purple prairie gay feathers, large-leafed plantain lilies and other lily flowers, sea-holly flowers, and purple Clematis. Tulips, Crocus, and other Iris bulbs make tasty treats due to their high starch content, and they often kill many other garden plants along the way just by their tunneling activities.
Crafty thieves that strike your garden from above and below, squirrels have appetites for nuts, fruits, flower buds, mushrooms, apples, oranges, apricots, and virtually every type of flower bulb they can dig up. Squirrels save up ample storage of nuts for the winter, and what better place to bury them than in your garden? After all, they can grab a quick snack of your fresh bulbs while storing their nuts safely. Fresh vegetable sprouts are their favorite salad.
Groundhogs crave tulip flowers and leaves in addition to Crocus sativus flowers. As a side, they may dine out on the wild clover in your lawn, which is high in protein and minerals. Some groundhogs have also been known to snack on marigolds, even though some believe that the smell of these flowers is a repellent to rodents and bugs. (Read more about this here.)
Choosing what you plant outside is only one part of rodent control. If you have a severe rodent problem, ABC Home & Commercial Services in Orlando can help.