Indian Time - A Voice from the Eastern Door

This week I would like to share some effective and humane ways to keep animals away from your home and out of your vegetable and flower gardens. Fencing is the first suggestion, but fencing is not necessarily the only method that will work. You need to encircle your garden with wire fencing. The fencing needs to be buried about eight inches in the ground, if you are bothered by skunks or rabbits and buried 12 inches below if you are bothered by squirrels. To deter deer, fencing needs to be at least seven feet high. Scarecrows, fake snakes, and owls do not work for long because as soon as the animals see they never move, they move in. You can also use plants to deter animals. Squirrels do not like sage or lavender. Deer do not care for plants like irises, lavender, calendulas, basil, fleabane, and marigolds. You can look on the Internet to see which plants will survive in your area. There is a simple idea that is a proven deer deterrent.

Deer do not like the smell of human hair or the smell of some bar soaps. When deer get the scent of humans they will run away. Human hair and its oils carry our human scent right to their noses. You can get the hair from a local beauty shop or barber who are usually more than happy to get rid of the hair. What we did down state was to put the hair in old nylon stockings, tie them off with a knot, and hang them all along the fence line, and where there was no fencing we tied the hair filled stockings to anything they could hang from. It will work for a while, but when the deer start to get close to the areas they are not wanted in, it is time to renew the stocking human hair bags.

To deter deer, you can also use bars of smelly soap. Do not use the sweet smelling ones that actually attract the deer.  This process is a bit more complicated then using human hair, but it works. Drill a hole through several bars of soap. Use one or two bars per garden side. If you don’t have a drill you can make the holes with a long nail or screw. Pull heavy string through the holes and tie the bars to the fence, if you have one, or tie to stakes you place around the garden or areas needing protection. The deer do not like the soap smell and should stay away. You can also use rags soaked with Avon’s Skin So Soft Bath Oil. To do this you spray the perimeter of your garden with straight Skin So Soft Bath Oil that you put into a spray bottle. Do not dilute it. The Skin So Soft will keep all kinds of animals and insect pests away! If you have a problem with cats that frequent your outside areas some who spray that terrible musk around your house and gardens, here is a sure way to keep them away. Get some cayenne pepper and crush it up a little bit and put it in a quart of water. Let this mixture brew for at least two days. Put this mixture into a spray bottle and spray the areas you want to keep the cats away from. Once the cats get a noseful of this mixture they leave quickly! Respray every three days for a while. After the cats come back a few times and keep smelling the mixture, they will get the message and stop returning. They get the message by at least their third visit and look for new territory to mark and spray. Keeping mice from entering your homes takes some investigation. You first have to find out where they are entering. You need to know what environments they seek out and what materials will work best to rodent-proof your house. You first need to remove the mice that are there already. You can use havahart humane traps to catch and release them (far away from your house). The next thing you have to do is find out how they got into the house in the first place.  You need to examine the exterior of your house for any entry points. Mice are good climbers, so you have to look high and low. Mice only need a dime size hole to enter the house. If they can get their head into a hole or crack, the rest of their body elongates and then they wiggle into the house. You need to seal all cracks and holes. Be sure to seal where plumbing fixtures, electrical lines, air conditioning conduits, hose bibs, and dryer vents come into or go through the wall. Check door seals on the house and your garage. They need to be changed every few years to keep them tight. Be sure the seals go all the way across all the edges of the doors. If you can see light streaming from anywhere around a door, you can assume a mouse will be able to get inside. Keep tall grasses away from the your foundation walls. Eliminating vegetation along your outer walls is an important task. Check joints where sidewalks meet the foundation, if open seal them. The holes on the outside of a house can be filled with a quick setting concrete patch. If the holes are meant for air passage (YOU DO NOT WANT TO SEAL IT), but you can fill it with a copper mesh product called, Stuf-It. Copper will not degrade when it gets wet, and it will not rust. You can also use hardware cloth to cover the holes. It is not really a cloth. It is a mesh of galvanized metal. You will need a sheet metal cutter to cut it, but it’s a great inexpensive way to seal up the holes. It is also one the rodents cannot chew through. It is devastating to find your garden or shrub areas used by stray dog and cats as a place to poop and pee. A friend of mine in Cold Spring, NY uses the following and she swears it works. It is called a Contech Electronic Scarecrow Motion Activated Sprinkler. You can find them on the Internet. There are other brands of scarecrow sprinklers. I list some below. The Scarecrow sprinkler senses animals that come within a 1,000 foot square area via its built in motion detector. As soon as an animal is detected (people too), it blasts the animal with a jet of water accompanied by a startling sprinkler sound. (no more dog or kitty crap). There could not be a more humane way to deter animals from your gardens and shrubs. My friend said she just wishes her scarecrow sprinkler had a better-made stake than the plastic one it has. Perhaps the handyman in your family could figure out a way to attach a sturdier stake to the sprinkler, if you buy one. My friend says trust her - you will love this item. The only fall back with this item is that strong winds can set it off, so you will want to place it where it will be somewhat sheltered, or turn it off on windy days. My friend put up a nice looking fancy privacy fence where the worst winds came from, and that worked for her.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000071NUS (Contech motion sprinkler free shipping)

http://www.northerntool.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product_6970_1050064_1050064 Havahart Spray Away Scarecrow Sprinkler

http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/difficult/msg0522072029314.html (make your own motion Scarecrow Sprinkler)

To keep those dogs, cats, and other animals from knocking over and digging through your garbage cans, try the following suggestions. I see here at Akwesasne that some people have built some really nice wooden trash bins to keep their garbage in while keeping animals out. The trash collector should open from the top to put the garbage in and also from the front for easy removal by the trash collector. The doors should be able to be latched to prevent smart animals from crawling in and under the doors. I have seen many a raccoon and a few dogs master that trick. For those of us who do not or cannot build things, we live not too far from some Amish communities, and I know they make some really nice decorative, sturdy, and proven to work solid wood trash bins. If you do not have a bin or cannot get one be sure to buy good quality garbage cans that have very tight fitting lids.

I always make sure there is place on the cans and lids to tie the lids to the cans. I have seen during windstorms a herd of trash can covers blowing around Kanatakon. I use those bungee type ties. The suggestions above like the Avon Skin So Soft and other herbs can also be sprayed around the top of the cans. You can also use petroleum jelly just under the lid of the trashcan to keep small crawling pests from getting inside. If you have ambitious raccoons or strong wily dogs that get the lid off no matter how tight it fits, place a huge rock on the cover. You can also buy trashcans with lids that have two open handles on either side that can be secured with tight fitting bungee cords. This also prevents spilling if the can gets tipped over. It is also a good idea to keep your garbage cans clean. It is also important not to overfill the cans so they cannot shut tight. There are a lot more safe and humane ways to deter unwanted animals. If you have a computer, just google deter unwanted animals humanely. There are so many humane ways listed on the Internet, and I could not list them all. We all need to do our part in finding, according to our original instructions from the Creator, how to live in harmony with everything around us.