pest control the organic way

It only gradually dawned on me that so far this winter I have still not noticed any rodent damage to the plants in the greenhouse.  In the previous two or three years it suffered from repeated mouse incursions.  Mice are lethal when it comes to pots of small tulips or fritillaries, digging out and eating almost every bulb while leaving the foliage strewn across the compost like an unwanted salad garnish from a pub sandwich.  One year they hollowed the emerging shoots out of half the hyacinths.  They also took to digging into the rootballs of the larger pots of geraniums in search of a cosy winter home.

I ended up stationing a pair of battery powered electric mouse zappers on the staging and balanced across the rims of pots on the floor, which yielded a steady supply of stiff, sad little corpses.  I don't like killing mice, with their big eyes and tiny, neat paws, but I can't have them living in the greenhouse.  They have hundreds of yards of hedge, an acre of woodland and the whole of the meadow to choose from, so it's not as if they had nowhere else to go.  I drew the line with mechanical traps, which don't always deliver a clean death, but still don't like tipping the contents of the zapper out into the hedge before resetting it baited with a fresh peanut.

This winter, so far, fingers crossed, no mouse damage at all.  I am happy not to have to deal with the bodies, or the disappointment of losing a year's growing and twenty quid's worth of bulbs.  And I am happy not to have to keep buying replacement electric zappers.  Even when I managed to find a place for the zappers where they wouldn't get dripped on, and avoided watering them, the damp of the greenhouse in a British winter played havoc with their electrics and they would trigger before a mouse even touched them.  I would find the kill warning light flashing, but no mouse and half the time no peanut either.  Drying the zapper out indoors in a warm room sometimes got them going again for a time, but I still had to view them as essentially disposable.  Electric rat zappers are not cheap.

Credit must go to the young cats.  All that time they spend hanging around the concrete outside the greenhouse must have brought the local mouse population crashing down.  I am sure there are still plenty left in the meadow and the wood, indeed I find the entrances to their burrows in the flower beds each time I do any weeding, but the plague of mice in the greenhouse has ended.  There haven't been any more rat outbreaks under the chicken house either.  And all done without using rodenticides.