What's up everyone? Welcome back to the show. Today we're talking pests again and this time we're talking rats and mice. Gosh these are so annoying. I've talked about the epic soil starter mix a lot. As you know, that's an organic mix and one day I went out into my garden shed, which is outdoors of course, but I thought

it was pretty secure. Turns out it's not. They bored into my little organic cardboard bag of my epic soil starter and ate a ton of the fertilizer and then pooped all in the fertilizer. I was so sad. I have so much

epic soil starter though that I'm going to be okay. I've got 25 or 30 pounds of it so I'm fine.

That being said, it brought up the question question how do we get rid of rodents in the

garden super annoying they multiply insanely fast most rodents have a three

week gestation period.

They can birth up to 14 babies per litter,

and a female can have up to 10 separate litters a year.

Whoa!

If you do the math there, you're looking at 140 rodents coming from one rodent, right? And so the math there does not really favor

us as gardeners. So how do we keep mice, rats, etc out of our garden?

Well, one interesting way and I'm not sure that I would recommend this but this is something that I've read

is to skip mulching. So mulching is great for weed control adding nutrients to the soil. It can be bad if rodents are an issue though. So you may want to use a wood chip variety mulch instead of like a grass mulch or something like that.

If you're gonna mulch and you have a rodent problem, I would highly suggest going with

wood chips or something like that.

Next, get a cat.

Earlier this week we talked about Pet Safe Gardens for cat lovers.

Well, how about rodent unfriendly gardens if you get a cat?

I don't know. That's just one thing that you can do. Now that's an extreme solution you're adding an entirely new organism to your life but you know

what if maybe you've been thinking about getting a cap for a while and you've got a

rodent problem I don't know seems like it might make sense next one planting mint

mint oddly is kind of a deterrent for many rodents and it's very easy to grow again you're going to want to keep it in its own container

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