Keep Wild Animals Out of The Garden

If you like to grow a nice vegetable garden during the spring, summer, and fall, you know how much work it is to get everything just right in order to have your vegetables flourish. You have to make sure that the water and soil moisture is not too saturated or too dry; you have to be careful of shade and too much or not enough sunlight.

A lot goes into growing a vegetable garden, that you don't want to have your plants and vegetables eating by animals, and wild animals love fruits and vegetables.

Different animals are known for eating different things, so it's a good idea to know about what animals will eat what items in your garden. That will help you figure out what you need to do to keep the wild animals out of your garden.

• Deers- corn, flowers, fruit trees, and a variety of vegetables
• Rabbits- carrots, beets, lettuce, beans, and strawberries
• Mice and voles- green vegetation
• Groundhogs- just about anything (they will dig up vegetation just to sample and move to something else)
• Raccoons- corn, melons, as well as digging up your compost heap

How to Get Rid of Animals in the Garden

• Fake owls, scarecrows, and other bird deterrents to keep birds out.
• Use smelly bars of soap to keep deer out of the garden.
• Set up a single string fence around the garden and tie aluminum pie pans to it to keep raccoons out.
• Sprinkle bacon grease on the outside of your garden to keep rabbits out.
• Dog hair, cat litter, and moth balls will help keep rabbits out.
  
• Sprinkle ground up black pepper, chili pepper, hot peppers, or Cayenne peppers around the garden and your vegetables to keep raccoons and most other animals out of the garden.
• Mulch is said to deter deer, rabbits, gophers, moles, and voles
• Raised garden beds will help confuse certain animals so that they don't enter the garden
• Plant garlic, onions, chives, catnip, lavender, and marigolds around the garden as there are some animals, like rabbits who do not like these plants
• If you know you have certain animals that are constantly in your yard, plant their favorites in other places away from the garden; for example, plant clover on the other side of the yard for the rabbits to munch on
• Plant stakes of different heights around the garden to confuse deer and other animals and prevent them from getting into the garden
  

If these repellents don't work, you can always build a fence. You just want to make sure that the fence is high enough so that deer, dogs, and other animals cannot jump over; also, make sure that the fence is built so that rabbit, mice, and other animals cannot dig under.

Because some animals are good climbers- raccoons and such- it may be hard to completely keep animals out of the garden with a fence alone, so you may have to opt for a combination of ideas.

Deer

• Bachelor’s buttons
• Daffodils
• Lavenders
• Sunflowers
• Yarrow

Rabbits

• Agastache
• Caryopteris
• Chamisa
• Cold hardy Spanish Broom
• Coreopsis Moonbeam
• Evergreen bushes and trees
• Gladiolus
• Lavenders
• Nepeta
• Orange globe mallow
• Oregano
• Ratibida (yellow and Mexican Hat)
• Rosemary
• Russian sage
• Sages (Artemisia) of all varieties
  
• Silver-edged horehound
• Thyme
• Various Salvia