Any ideas about stopping rodents from eating all our courgettes and
pumpkins? I've tried rat poison, netting, and water traps. Last year they
attacked the tomatoes and we lost a good quarter of the crop.

Any new suggestions would be appreciated and tried. We live in a small
town and rodents will always be everwhere (it took a few years but the
house is now mouse / rat proof). Neighbours brought in a couple chickens so
hopefully the mice will migrate over that way. We'll be using live traps
soon -----

This newsgroup has been good with providing a lot of interesting and
usefull ideas. Hoping this thread will find something new.

Thanks in advance.

Mark Thompson

On 04/09/2017 06:17, Mark wrote:

Any ideas about stopping rodents from eating all our courgettes and
pumpkins? I've tried rat poison, netting, and water traps. Last year they
attacked the tomatoes and we lost a good quarter of the crop.

Crumbs. I've never had that problem although I live in the country and
it isn't uncommon to see the odd mouse, vole or ratt. They have never
attacked vegetables in the ground apart from the odd spud or fallen
apple. There are loads of courgettes for them to nibble this time of
year too - we can't keep up (and get bored with the same old recipes).

I have bait and traps in the garage to avoid rodents setting up home in
there and have to be very careful about storing apples and pears
securely. Squirrels took a corner of the garage roof off one year to get
at them and mice have been known to find ingenious ways of getting to
what I thought were inaccessible storage trays in the garage.

Any new suggestions would be appreciated and tried. We live in a small
town and rodents will always be everwhere (it took a few years but the
house is now mouse / rat proof). Neighbours brought in a couple chickens so
hopefully the mice will migrate over that way. We'll be using live traps
soon -----

My suggestion would be a more potent rat poison bait from a farming
supplier. I tried the stuff from B&Q on mine and they thrived on it
(you need to put it in approved mouse/rat only access traps and clear up
any dead bodies so that carrion feeders don't get poisoned by them)

There is a low limit on how much they will sell you without a license -
the rules may well have been tightened since I got mine. Handle with
care - it is more dangerous that the stuff sold to the general public.

I also use a few well placed classical mousetraps if I know there is one
about. The bait is for prevention rather than anything else. I don't do
anything to control numbers in the garden - neighbourhood cats do that.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown