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rabbit nibbling on garden with the words protect your garden from even the cutest nibbles and bites

10 Easy Ways To Protect Your Garden From Common Animals and Pests

Posted on: Monday, June 14, 2021

Planting and growing your own vegetables can be rewarding, simply learning to protect your garden from pests and animals tin can involve a lot of trial and fault – especially if you aren't sure which common garden pest is helping themselves to a individual salad bar. We've constitute 10 piece of cake ways to protect your garden from the experts at CountryLiving magazine.

Protect Your Garden from Pests & Animals In A Few Piece of cake Steps

Step 1: Identify The Culprit

Bunny Rabbit

Choosing the right kind of management method, such as how tall a fence y'all might demand, means figuring out who's eating what. Look for telltale signs:

  • Deer may leave tracks in the soil and make clean snips on herbaceous plants or tear woody plants
  • Rabbits make precipitous cuts on herbaceous and woody plants and may leave pellet droppings
  • Squirrels will divide shells or husks of nuts, and dig upward flower bulbs
  • Birds peck holes in fruit or steal information technology before you lot even know information technology's ripe

Step Ii: Debate It

Fencing is the most effective manner to protect your garden from pests and keep unwanted visitors out. A debate that's two to iii anxiety tall will work for near rabbits, although persistent ones may try to couch underneath. To deter them, extend the contend nigh a foot underground.

Chicken wire, hardware fabric or rabbit fencing are the to the lowest degree expensive alternatives for pocket-sized mammals. A fence that's at least 6 to eight anxiety tall will piece of work for most deer, and plastic bird netting tin exist placed over small edible bushes like berries before they ripen.

Lavender

Stride Three: Choose Less Tasty Plants

If they're hungry plenty, animals volition eat annihilation. Just in that location are certain kinds of plants that are less appealing than others – especially plants that are highly aromatic, fuzzy or take prickles. Take a look around your neighborhood to see what's fared well and talk to your local nursery (like our gardening experts here at SummerWinds) for recommendations.

Step Iv: Protect New Plants

If your seeds are starting to sprout, or peradventure you lot've but brought domicile some starts from the plant nursery, animals and garden pests will be attracted to the tender new growth. The plant's small size and new lease on life will go out them much less able to bounce back from grazing damage.

Protect your garden by installing a fence or using trunk wraps to protect new plants and shrubs, and a low-cal cyberspace covering over planter boxes.

Raised Garden Bed

Pace Five: Garden In Pots And Raised Beds

Sometimes y'all can protect your garden from pests and forbid animals from nibbling by elevating your pots or planting in raised beds. A raised bed two feet or taller will limit rabbit damage, peculiarly if you add a curt argue on top. Pots can be mounted on railings, or attempt planting greens in window boxes – and out of attain of hungry bunnies and deer.

Step Six: Don't Be Too Tidy

If y'all live in a less urban surface area, let the shrubs and grasses around the edge of your yard become a little wild. If there are other opportunities for nutrient around you, your garden will present less of an attractive target. Animals will also be less probable to come out into the centre of your yard, where they will exist exposed to predators, if there is a nutrient source nearby that doubles as shelter.

Composting

Footstep 7: Contain Your Compost

Open compost piles concenter all kinds of creatures that then discover the other delicacies in your backyard. Protect your garden from pests past using a self-independent compost with a lid to keep dumpster divers away. If you feed your pets outdoors, be sure to bring their bowls inside after meals so you won't concenter skunks, opossums and raccoons. If you proceed bird seed or other food sources exterior, secure them in a sealed bucket or chew-proof container.

Stride Viii: Scare Them Away

Metallic streamers, bird record or an former-fashioned scarecrow may proceed birds abroad, but crave being moved around the 1000 regularly so they don't become used to them. Motion activated sprinklers or lights are another possibility to scare away mammals.

Step 9: Try Repellants (But Don't Hold Your Breath)

Odor repellants are granular and effort to keep the animal away from an area with a bad olfactory property. Gustation repellents are sprayed on vulnerable plants and cause an fauna that ingests them to experience ill. It's of import to annotation that they won't crusade long-term impairment, just railroad train pests to stay away from a specific surface area. These products have to exist used year-round and must be reapplied subsequently rain, plus animals are known to simply eat the plants anyway or go used to the taste.

Squirrel

Step Ten: Do A Reality Check

In whatever given yr, there are a number of factors that affect how much damage animals might impact your garden. There will exist good years and bad years, and realize that what you're doing in your thousand benefits the local wildlife likewise – even if you didn't go to bask that heirloom tomato you planted, there's always next season.