Yes I agree rats are everywhere BUT normally you don't see them on a regular
basis. When you start seeing them then there is an infestation. When the
fruit trees didn't have anymore fruit on them and the ground was cleared the
rats decided to move to our house. Now the rats are the demons everyone
makes of them! They eat and destroy the wiring and insulation under the
house. We don't store food in the garage and our trash is in containers. We
have had terminex here to find why we have such a population of rats and the
fruit trees are the only food source we have around our yard. We do have
bait stations out and are noticing a decline in activity. We just want to
avoid getting in this postion again.
These rats are huge!
We don't want to dig up the trees because replacing them with other non
fruit bearing trees would be difficult since our yard is a steep slope.
"escape" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 01:22:27 GMT, "99windstar"
opined:
This question is going to seem weird but I am sure you all will
understand.
I have an Apple tree and Pear Tree. Our first year in our home we didn't
have any fruit. Last year we had fruit on both. Along with the fruit we
had
rats! We diligently picked up the dropped fruit but still had rats. Our
first year when there was no fruit there were no rats. My question is how
do
we stop the trees from bearing fruit? We don't want to cut them down, they
are nice trees but the fruit invite unwelcomed guests. Any ideas?
Regardless what you do, you have rats. Rats are everywhere and anywhere.
My
neighbor kills them with poison and we still have rats everywhere and
anywhere.
It doesn't matter if we have bird food out or not, there are rats. Rats
are not
the demons people want them to be.
One thing you can do is never prune your trees and make sure you never
fertilize
them. I believe you may be able to spray the blossoms with copper spray
(please
check into this thoroughly before doing it) which will kill the blossoms.
What I'm wondering is why would you want to keep the trees when you don't
want
the fruit? That is curious. You could replace these trees with others,
but
know this, you will always have rats.
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