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We talk about the issues we are seeing with an out of control critter infestation in our area and solutions on how to deal with it in your yards.
Show Notes
Keith: [00:00:00] Good morning, Keith Ramsey with the garden supply company. These days, everybody that comes to the garden centers has deer or rabbit problems, and a lot of times, these problems'll follow a cycle. The rabbits get really out of control, and they're eating all the plants. The Hawk population only increases, or the Fox population will increase.
And then there'll be very few rabbits.. right.
Joe: now, in my neighborhood, the rabbits are winning.
Keith: Yeah, absolutely. It's like some scary movie or something. There are rabbits everywhere.
Joe: Yeah, I'll pull into my driveway at night, and the light will shine, and it will be three or four rabbits scatter like cockroaches.
Keith: I've got a little beagle that loves to chase rabbits, squirrels and. The rabbit poop on the front sidewalk, I think, is just they're just messing with him, really. He's asleep, he's locked up, in the house, and they're out there eating all our plants.[00:01:00]
Our neighborhood
Joe: definitely does have a set of Hawks. There are two or three that in one of them is pretty. And I got a tiny dog, and yesterday the big Hawk landed on the railing to go downstairs where my dogs go outside, off the back deck. Wow. We sit in there. Like I saw that little dog,
Keith: I wouldn't think right now a dog would even be of any interest. There are so many rabbits out.
But, they're they, when people come into the garden center, and they've planted these plants, and they've lost all these plants, do you know the neighborhood rabbit? And there's
Joe: certain plants that rabbits really they're probably the expensive ones. Yeah.
Keith: It's always they're going to start with their favorite plant, and they work they'll work their way down, so it's you'll find these plants that, they're rabbit resistant, or they're not rabbits aren't supposed to like them. And once all the rest of the plants are gone, they're going to eat that one too. Yeah. You're trying to get people good advice. And eventually, the advice runs out.
Joe: No, really like certain vegetables, but if it's served and it's the
Keith: only food exactly. I want something green, and all there is
Joe: spinach.
Keith: a piece of bacon in it.
You put bacon [00:02:00] on anything, and it tastes good. Deer are another thing. The population of deer and the more houses that go in, the more the deer gets squeezed. There are all kinds of things you can do to deter deer and deter rabbits. Repellents are one of them. They, you're spraying the plant down.
You need to do it consistently. Every time we get torrential downpours or a week's worth of rain, you need to go out and reapply. And you also need to reapply when the plants are coming out of the ground in the spring. They're the size of a baseball when they get to the size of a beach ball. If you haven't resprayed it, the repellent has been diluted basically by the size of the growth of the plant.
So you need to add more, more repellent. The other thing you can do is you can do fencing, and you can do it. A fishing line is a good deterrent for deer. You can run fishing lines just around trees in your yard. And when they're walking along, you can put flagging tape on it when they stop for the flag and tape, they see the fishing line, and then they won't pass through that.
They don't like the deterrent. Being tangled up in fishing lines. Yeah. It's a good way of doing it [00:03:00] inexpensively and then
Joe: nothing worse than walking through a spider web.
Keith: Exactly. And especially this time of year in the fall, October timeframe, there are spiderwebs everywhere. It seems like they're saving up a meal for the winter, we carry several repellents, but I must garden as a repellent that we carry that it's made in chapel hill. It's a local, small company. It's all organic. It's a product that I absolutely love. I love the owner. I love keeping things local and spending money. It's been, I must
Joe: like I M U
Keith: S T I must garden.
It's been widely tested. There are lots of things. People always have solutions for everything that you can a bar soap mothball, all these other things. The thing with mothballs is, they're poisonous. My parents used to use mothballs on hostas to keep rabbits away. They turn around, and I've got a mouthful of mothballs, so I get my stomach pumped when I'm two or three years old. So the quick, cheap approach isn't necessarily the best.
No, but they do work.
Joe: [00:04:00] hostas all over the place. Like it was just too much. And I'm not a giant fan of the plants. I would have paid rabbits to eat those hostas, but they wouldn't touch them.
Keith: That's the way it works. Now, the other thing is, when the population is right, they're not coming into your yard like the deer literally walked down my side. They don't do a lot of damage because I've got so many plants that they'll nibble here and nibble there.
And when the population gets to a point. A new neighborhood comes in as those deer get squeezed into another, an older neighborhood out of the woods that's happening all over our area. It's happening all over our area. We've been recommending bow hunters actually because we're removing some of the population, and we don't have wolves in our area.
Joe: I think I saw an email from the game department about that.
Keith: Yeah. So it's we've got a list of bowhunters that we can recommend to people and, you find a nice, safe place on an acre or bigger. A five or 10-acre area in a town or around town is ideal. You find it you find a good bow hunter, and they [00:05:00] remove three or four deer.
You're affecting the population over time. And it kind of, it's almost a, must it without removing some deer you've got here that are going hungry. Now, they're they're crossing the road more often, then you're removing deer by a car accident is the
Joe: solution the same.
Keith: I don't know what the solution is for rabbits beagles, a good solution for rabbits. I've gotten ours trained where they walk in a circle because we've got one of those dog fences. It's a beacon in the house, and it sends us, sends a signal out a certain distance. And when the signals running out, that's when the dog gets zapped.
So the dogs know their circle. They never get zapped that rabbits, know, the dogs are. So they come out of the woods, and they make this circle all the way around our yard until at nighttime. And then they come right into the circle. And now the dogs are inside you. Now the animals get pretty darn smart trapping rabbits, I guess maybe and, have a heart trap and moving them to a different location.
And, or a beagle, a beagle, a good scenario, some little yappy dog. [00:06:00] Fencing, there's all kinds of deer fencing, fencing. Your entire yard is an option. But it's, it's a little bit more expensive option and
Joe: it wasn't traditional fences. Rabbits are going to go right under like vinyl fans.
Keith: like a vegetable garden, you'd need a metal fence. And the deer fence that you can use is a fairly inexpensive plastic fence that you can't see in the distance. So it's not doesn't really break your vision into the woods.
Joe: I see many people who have done it before tried to put chicken wire and the gaps under their fence to keep out the right. If you
Keith: can, if you can, create a barrier down low that will help with rabbits, for sure. But then you get a couple of rabbits in the fence.
Yeah. Yeah. I finished
Joe: it. And then I was like. Finally, I was sitting out on the deck the weekend. That's where I got the. And all fixed up and all my little fences underneath my fence. And there's a fricking rabbit in the yard. Yeah. It's I don't know.
Keith: You don't want to see two rabbits in the yard.
Mr. And Mrs. Rabbit just moved into your fence, gardens. Fencing works better for deer than for rabbits. If you're talking about a vegetable garden, a small area, [00:07:00] you can certainly fence that's out rabbits. There are a lot of granular products you can use.
I must garden does mole involve granular, and they do a Deer and rabbit granular, but that works really well. It's easy to put out, and it's not like a, it's not like spray. It's more of a scent-based product. So they come in, smell the garlic and some of these natural things, and move on.
And that works really well. Moles and voles are obviously other major issues. And they're doing damage under the ground, which makes it a little more difficult. There are a couple of different things you can do. You can do, like a vibrating steak. Some of the wind-based vibrating sticks will keep bowls and moles moving on.
They think there's a predator out there, and they'll steer clear of that area. There are battery-operated ones that work as well. And then there's poison peanuts and poison worms that you can put down in the ground, and you're getting rid of the population, but the malls and bowls and rabbits, both the malt, they multiply so fast that's where it turns into an issue of deer at least or having young once a year.
So the population doesn't get as [00:08:00] crazy until you see development as we have right now, and it just gets much worse. The other thing you can do for moles and voles is had 'em permit till or sand. When you see surface holes from Vols, you can add sand to it. The sand kind of hourglasses down into the ground, creating an environment where they can't create a cavity in the ground.
Cause the sand keeps sliding down. So putting sand around a plant, that's got a vole problem. It just fills those cavities, and the voles will move. And then when you're planning, there are products like vole king, which is a wire basket you roll around the root ball plant.
And then you plan it within the basket. It's a stainless steel basket. So the roots grow out of the stainless steel basket. The Vols will still get outside of that basket and trim roots back, but they can't get all the way to the base of the plants. They're not going to kill the plant and then permit TILs, an old stamp.
The permit has expanded slate heated, and it pops and expands, but it's got a lot of jagged edges. So people will mix that in with soil and plant the plant in a bed of a permit. And that keeps voles out and [00:09:00] keeps plants pretty on the healthiest. But, I think removal and a lot of, in many ways and limiting the population taking away some of their habitats and when you've got rabbits if you don't have piles of brush where they can hide and multiply.
They're going to move on and move into the neighbor's yard or head into the woods or whatever. Suppose you've got a yard. It's got a lot of covers. They're gonna, they're going to find a place, and you're gonna continuously have rabbit problems. But we have had a lot of people take us up on the bow hunting scenario.
I'm a hunter, and when you've got a responsible adult that's been hunting for years, if you can give them a small corner view, yo. And they can put up a stand or put in a blind and start to remove a deer here or there. You're not taking a lot of deer, and many times, venison, deer, and meat go to people who need it. I took two deer last year, and we took the meat, and we actually put it on Facebook marketplace. And We had 25 people that came to pick up meat this summer. It was up on the Virginia border. And there were many people [00:10:00] who showed up to pick up free venison, and it was all ground and ready, packaged, and ready to go. So it was fun to feed the neighbors.
Joe: What about possums.
Keith: Possums are supposed to be good. They're always picking up that they look great. They're not pretty animals. Oh. They're always picking up whatever meat scraps, dead animals, whatever.
They're not great. If you're trying to go after your veggies are what year now they're going after your chickens. Maybe if you're, if you're raising chickens in the backyard they're they like to kill a chicken, but supposedly they eat and remove a lot of ticks.
That's part of their appetite. It's something new I've heard. Yeah. That's something new I've heard in the last few years. I'm like two ugly creatures, meet in the woods, the possum wins. Anyway, so there are, the larger possum population you have, supposedly the fewer pics you have.
But it is a creepy looking
Thanks for listening today. We'll catch you on the next podcast.
And then there'll be very few rabbits.. right.
Joe: now, in my neighborhood, the rabbits are winning.
Keith: Yeah, absolutely. It's like some scary movie or something. There are rabbits everywhere.
Joe: Yeah, I'll pull into my driveway at night, and the light will shine, and it will be three or four rabbits scatter like cockroaches.
Keith: I've got a little beagle that loves to chase rabbits, squirrels and. The rabbit poop on the front sidewalk, I think, is just they're just messing with him, really. He's asleep, he's locked up, in the house, and they're out there eating all our plants.[00:01:00]
Our neighborhood
Joe: definitely does have a set of Hawks. There are two or three that in one of them is pretty. And I got a tiny dog, and yesterday the big Hawk landed on the railing to go downstairs where my dogs go outside, off the back deck. Wow. We sit in there. Like I saw that little dog,
Keith: I wouldn't think right now a dog would even be of any interest. There are so many rabbits out.
But, they're they, when people come into the garden center, and they've planted these plants, and they've lost all these plants, do you know the neighborhood rabbit? And there's
Joe: certain plants that rabbits really they're probably the expensive ones. Yeah.
Keith: It's always they're going to start with their favorite plant, and they work they'll work their way down, so it's you'll find these plants that, they're rabbit resistant, or they're not rabbits aren't supposed to like them. And once all the rest of the plants are gone, they're going to eat that one too. Yeah. You're trying to get people good advice. And eventually, the advice runs out.
Joe: No, really like certain vegetables, but if it's served and it's the
Keith: only food exactly. I want something green, and all there is
Joe: spinach.
Keith: a piece of bacon in it.
You put bacon [00:02:00] on anything, and it tastes good. Deer are another thing. The population of deer and the more houses that go in, the more the deer gets squeezed. There are all kinds of things you can do to deter deer and deter rabbits. Repellents are one of them. They, you're spraying the plant down.
You need to do it consistently. Every time we get torrential downpours or a week's worth of rain, you need to go out and reapply. And you also need to reapply when the plants are coming out of the ground in the spring. They're the size of a baseball when they get to the size of a beach ball. If you haven't resprayed it, the repellent has been diluted basically by the size of the growth of the plant.
So you need to add more, more repellent. The other thing you can do is you can do fencing, and you can do it. A fishing line is a good deterrent for deer. You can run fishing lines just around trees in your yard. And when they're walking along, you can put flagging tape on it when they stop for the flag and tape, they see the fishing line, and then they won't pass through that.
They don't like the deterrent. Being tangled up in fishing lines. Yeah. It's a good way of doing it [00:03:00] inexpensively and then
Joe: nothing worse than walking through a spider web.
Keith: Exactly. And especially this time of year in the fall, October timeframe, there are spiderwebs everywhere. It seems like they're saving up a meal for the winter, we carry several repellents, but I must garden as a repellent that we carry that it's made in chapel hill. It's a local, small company. It's all organic. It's a product that I absolutely love. I love the owner. I love keeping things local and spending money. It's been, I must
Joe: like I M U
Keith: S T I must garden.
It's been widely tested. There are lots of things. People always have solutions for everything that you can a bar soap mothball, all these other things. The thing with mothballs is, they're poisonous. My parents used to use mothballs on hostas to keep rabbits away. They turn around, and I've got a mouthful of mothballs, so I get my stomach pumped when I'm two or three years old. So the quick, cheap approach isn't necessarily the best.
No, but they do work.
Joe: [00:04:00] hostas all over the place. Like it was just too much. And I'm not a giant fan of the plants. I would have paid rabbits to eat those hostas, but they wouldn't touch them.
Keith: That's the way it works. Now, the other thing is, when the population is right, they're not coming into your yard like the deer literally walked down my side. They don't do a lot of damage because I've got so many plants that they'll nibble here and nibble there.
And when the population gets to a point. A new neighborhood comes in as those deer get squeezed into another, an older neighborhood out of the woods that's happening all over our area. It's happening all over our area. We've been recommending bow hunters actually because we're removing some of the population, and we don't have wolves in our area.
Joe: I think I saw an email from the game department about that.
Keith: Yeah. So it's we've got a list of bowhunters that we can recommend to people and, you find a nice, safe place on an acre or bigger. A five or 10-acre area in a town or around town is ideal. You find it you find a good bow hunter, and they [00:05:00] remove three or four deer.
You're affecting the population over time. And it kind of, it's almost a, must it without removing some deer you've got here that are going hungry. Now, they're they're crossing the road more often, then you're removing deer by a car accident is the
Joe: solution the same.
Keith: I don't know what the solution is for rabbits beagles, a good solution for rabbits. I've gotten ours trained where they walk in a circle because we've got one of those dog fences. It's a beacon in the house, and it sends us, sends a signal out a certain distance. And when the signals running out, that's when the dog gets zapped.
So the dogs know their circle. They never get zapped that rabbits, know, the dogs are. So they come out of the woods, and they make this circle all the way around our yard until at nighttime. And then they come right into the circle. And now the dogs are inside you. Now the animals get pretty darn smart trapping rabbits, I guess maybe and, have a heart trap and moving them to a different location.
And, or a beagle, a beagle, a good scenario, some little yappy dog. [00:06:00] Fencing, there's all kinds of deer fencing, fencing. Your entire yard is an option. But it's, it's a little bit more expensive option and
Joe: it wasn't traditional fences. Rabbits are going to go right under like vinyl fans.
Keith: like a vegetable garden, you'd need a metal fence. And the deer fence that you can use is a fairly inexpensive plastic fence that you can't see in the distance. So it's not doesn't really break your vision into the woods.
Joe: I see many people who have done it before tried to put chicken wire and the gaps under their fence to keep out the right. If you
Keith: can, if you can, create a barrier down low that will help with rabbits, for sure. But then you get a couple of rabbits in the fence.
Yeah. Yeah. I finished
Joe: it. And then I was like. Finally, I was sitting out on the deck the weekend. That's where I got the. And all fixed up and all my little fences underneath my fence. And there's a fricking rabbit in the yard. Yeah. It's I don't know.
Keith: You don't want to see two rabbits in the yard.
Mr. And Mrs. Rabbit just moved into your fence, gardens. Fencing works better for deer than for rabbits. If you're talking about a vegetable garden, a small area, [00:07:00] you can certainly fence that's out rabbits. There are a lot of granular products you can use.
I must garden does mole involve granular, and they do a Deer and rabbit granular, but that works really well. It's easy to put out, and it's not like a, it's not like spray. It's more of a scent-based product. So they come in, smell the garlic and some of these natural things, and move on.
And that works really well. Moles and voles are obviously other major issues. And they're doing damage under the ground, which makes it a little more difficult. There are a couple of different things you can do. You can do, like a vibrating steak. Some of the wind-based vibrating sticks will keep bowls and moles moving on.
They think there's a predator out there, and they'll steer clear of that area. There are battery-operated ones that work as well. And then there's poison peanuts and poison worms that you can put down in the ground, and you're getting rid of the population, but the malls and bowls and rabbits, both the malt, they multiply so fast that's where it turns into an issue of deer at least or having young once a year.
So the population doesn't get as [00:08:00] crazy until you see development as we have right now, and it just gets much worse. The other thing you can do for moles and voles is had 'em permit till or sand. When you see surface holes from Vols, you can add sand to it. The sand kind of hourglasses down into the ground, creating an environment where they can't create a cavity in the ground.
Cause the sand keeps sliding down. So putting sand around a plant, that's got a vole problem. It just fills those cavities, and the voles will move. And then when you're planning, there are products like vole king, which is a wire basket you roll around the root ball plant.
And then you plan it within the basket. It's a stainless steel basket. So the roots grow out of the stainless steel basket. The Vols will still get outside of that basket and trim roots back, but they can't get all the way to the base of the plants. They're not going to kill the plant and then permit TILs, an old stamp.
The permit has expanded slate heated, and it pops and expands, but it's got a lot of jagged edges. So people will mix that in with soil and plant the plant in a bed of a permit. And that keeps voles out and [00:09:00] keeps plants pretty on the healthiest. But, I think removal and a lot of, in many ways and limiting the population taking away some of their habitats and when you've got rabbits if you don't have piles of brush where they can hide and multiply.
They're going to move on and move into the neighbor's yard or head into the woods or whatever. Suppose you've got a yard. It's got a lot of covers. They're gonna, they're going to find a place, and you're gonna continuously have rabbit problems. But we have had a lot of people take us up on the bow hunting scenario.
I'm a hunter, and when you've got a responsible adult that's been hunting for years, if you can give them a small corner view, yo. And they can put up a stand or put in a blind and start to remove a deer here or there. You're not taking a lot of deer, and many times, venison, deer, and meat go to people who need it. I took two deer last year, and we took the meat, and we actually put it on Facebook marketplace. And We had 25 people that came to pick up meat this summer. It was up on the Virginia border. And there were many people [00:10:00] who showed up to pick up free venison, and it was all ground and ready, packaged, and ready to go. So it was fun to feed the neighbors.
Joe: What about possums.
Keith: Possums are supposed to be good. They're always picking up that they look great. They're not pretty animals. Oh. They're always picking up whatever meat scraps, dead animals, whatever.
They're not great. If you're trying to go after your veggies are what year now they're going after your chickens. Maybe if you're, if you're raising chickens in the backyard they're they like to kill a chicken, but supposedly they eat and remove a lot of ticks.
That's part of their appetite. It's something new I've heard. Yeah. That's something new I've heard in the last few years. I'm like two ugly creatures, meet in the woods, the possum wins. Anyway, so there are, the larger possum population you have, supposedly the fewer pics you have.
But it is a creepy looking
Thanks for listening today. We'll catch you on the next podcast.
Creators & Guests
What is In The Garden?
In the Garden with Keith Ramsey is a podcast aimed at helping you grow and maintain a beautiful and healthy garden and landscape.
Each podcast will focus on a new specific topic. Check back every two weeks for the latest episode!