If you head out into the garden to find that your crops have been munched by an
unknown predator, chances are you might have rats in your garden.
Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening,
where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb.
Not only have I had problems with rats at the Homestead in the garden,
munching on different crops, which we'll talk about in a second,
but I've also had a problem with them in the home.
There's a hummingbird right there. That was really cool to see!
So I'll show you a clip, really quickly,
of some of the stuff I've had to deal with in my house. It's pretty ridiculous.
Oh, there he goes. How do you do that? How do you do that?
How do you do that? What?
So I had a Tokyo drifting rat in my house that was freaking me out.
It had to be dealt with. As well as rats out here in the garden.
So in this video, we're going to go through how rats behave.
You have to understand the pest,
you have to become the pest in order to combat it and prevent it.
And we'll talk about some strategies to just lessen their ability to bother your
crops.
But also we'll talk about some trapping options for you later in the video,
including a trap that I think is probably the most effective one that I've
personally seen.
So cultivate that Like button and I will decrease your rat populations by 50%.
And let's get into the video. When you're dealing with any pest,
you have to understand how they work on a fundamental level.
What do they like to eat? Where do they like to hide? What do they like to nest?
All that kind of stuff. So with rats, I mean, they're disease vectors.
You can get disease through their urine, through their droppings,
through their saliva. Look up the black plague if you were unfamiliar with that.
But you want to know, what are the signs of rats in your garden? I mean,
they can climb up your tomato vines, eat your tomatoes.
They'll climb up trees sometimes, eat your fruit.
It's a really big problem for some gardeners, including myself.
So how do you know if you're actually dealing with rats?
The first thing you'll notice is some sort of tunnel.
It's about two to four inches in diameter and sometimes they'll have these
little runs that come out of that tunnel. And these will often be on borderways.
So on your garden fence,
if you have a fence actually surrounding your garden itself,
some sort of edging, it might be along there. Next up you have their droppings,
which is probably the most telltale sign of rats.
You've got those a half inch long cylindrical droppings,
where they're out in the garden.
You can see them pretty easily but they're even easier to see if they may be in
your garden shed or God forbid, indoors, where I had to deal with them.
They'll have those droppings and they can kind of like smear and they're sort of
greasy. And that's how you know you're dealing with a rat.
It's a big lookin' dropping, kind of gross,
but that is one way to know that you have them. Finally,
the most heartbreaking way to know that you have rats is by looking at your
actual crops and noticing parallel teeth marks.
So that sort of gnawing parallel teeth mark that's going to show up on your root
crops or maybe your tomatoes or your fruits,
whatever they're eating in your garden.
That's how you know it's a rat and not something else.
If you're dealing with rats or you think you might be dealing with rats,
then prevention is going to be one of the best things you can do because rats
are what's called neophobic. They are afraid of new things.
Which means if you add a trap later on,
it might be a while before they actually get there.
So here's a great example of something I'm doing really poorly in my garden to
prevent from rats. This is what I call the cardboard graveyard,
which I'll use for sheet mulch,
all sorts of different applications in the garden.
But this is a great little nesting area for rats. They need shelter,
they need food, they need water.
Water is actually the most important thing they need. Mice can get it from food.
Rats need to actually drink water, find a water source.
So what's a great place for a rat to hang out? Well,
in this covered cardboard area where they can shimmy in between all these
different layers. If it ever rains,
probably some pools of water down there they can hang out in. And who knows?
The compost bin is right over there.
There might be some food sources that they can munch on. Not a great idea.
So if I really wanted to prevent rats in this area,
I should at the very least put this up off the ground,
put it on some bench or something,
stack it up and just keep it off so there's no shelter for the rats.
So here's another example of a place that is the perfect area for rats to
hang out in. I have my garden shed, here's my rainwater tank.
And I just have this pile of wood from stuff that got chopped down that I
haven't even touched yet. So what do you think they're going to do?
There's some debris here.
They're going to nest in here and they're going to scavenge around,
go into my garden at night and eat my crops. So I have to clean this up.
I'll put this up off the ground again,
just to make sure that there's nowhere easy for them to make a nest.
Continuing on with prevention,
something that might hurt a little bit to stop doing would be to stop feeding
wild animals.
So if you have like a bird feeder that's dropping the seed all over the ground,
that's a great way to passively feed rats too.
So you may want to either relocate that or stop that or minimize that to some
degree. Like we said, they also like fresh water sources.
So if you have rainwater capture, if you have irrigation systems,
if you have some sort of pond or something like that,
just make sure you limit that as much as you can. For example,
I have irrigation, right?
And so I'm making sure I'm checking all my connections that I'm not constantly
leaking water. I found one a couple of days ago.
I had to get a new hose to fix it.
Now I'm not putting a pool of fresh water on the ground in a semi-sheltered area
for the rats to hang out in.
There is another thing that almost all of us do as gardeners that rats
absolutely love to hang out in.
So there's a couple tips I have for you on prevention there too.
So here's a masterclass on how NOT to manage a compost bin to prevent rats.
This really isn't even a compost bin.
I'm in the middle of designing a huge compost bin here at the Homestead.
So in the meantime,
I have this Bagster and I just have thrown some of my debris and my paper
shreddings in here. This really is the perfect area to attract rats.
So I'm doing the opposite of what I should be doing here,
mostly because I don't have that compost bin set up. But you've got ample food.
You've got water because the compost is probably holding onto a little bit of
moisture there. And then you have the shelter element. So compost bins really,
in a gardener's life,
it's probably one of the places you're giving the most opportunity for rats to
hang out in.
So if you have a standard compost bin that's connected to the ground,
then screen off the bottom six inches or so of vertical height with
hardware cloth and also screen the bottom off completely.
Or if you really have a big problem,
just use a tumbler composter or switch to something that's completely enclosed
so you don't have any opportunity for them to get in.
No matter what you do,
you are still going to find little crevices in your home or in your shed that
a rat can get through. I mean, this is how they got through in my house.
At least I think it's how they got through.
So I had someone come out and take a look and kind of do a scan of every little
entryway into either my garden or into my home.
And so what happened here is there's these couple little punches through of my
stucco, which is kind of frustrating, when I bought the home.
But what we did is we put in kind of like a steel wool,
but it's way, way sharper. It's sharp on both ends.
So as soon as the rat's nose or whiskers or whatever touch it,
it's not going anywhere near it cause it's just gonna get completely cut up.
And you can just stuff that in all these little crevices and it really works
well for deterring them from entering into a structure you don't want them to
come in.
IF you've done all the prevention that you can possibly do and they're still
coming into your garden,
there are some things you can do to actually prevent them from getting at the
crop that you most want to protect. So I'm down low here in the tomato alley.
I've got some tomatoes coming in. They're not quite ripe yet.
Probably not ready for a rat to attack.
But what a lot of people will do is they'll take a mesh bag,
and this is a very intensive process,
but if you only have a few tomatoes and you want them this season,
you don't want rats to get at them, you can do something like this.
And so you take a mesh bag and you just cinch it around each tomato.
A lot of people will also do this in their fruit trees.
So I'll show you my apricot tree and something you could do there as well.
So here's the apricot tree that actually was on my property when I moved in.
Really happy to have this here. And fruiting up, as you can see.
Some beautiful apricots here. Don't use this bag, this is a Ziploc bag.
I just don't have a mesh bag. But all you would do is just take it,
you could even do it around this whole cluster if you wanted,
mesh because you need it to breathe. And you just go like that,
you'd use a little twist tie, cinch it around like that,
and you've protected it as much as you reasonably can.
This also protects from birds, which is kind of a nice little one-two punch.
If you've done your best efforts,
but a rat has still munched on something - a tomato, a pepper,
a carrot - just throw it away or throw it in the compost.
Don't try to salvage it and wash it and then eat it.
The risk of disease is just too high. There's no point in gambling like that.
But we've talked about prevention,
which for sure is the best way to deal with rats -
if you don't have to deal with them in the first place, by cleaning your space,
making sure you've removed food and water sources, all that kind of stuff.
That's going to be your best bet. We've talked about mitigation,
things like bagging your crops to protect them from rats that are already in
your garden.
But we do have to discuss extermination if you want to dispatch a rat because
the problem is just too severe.
You're losing too many of your crops or in my case,
they're literally running around your home trying to eat your flour and your
pancake mix, which I did not appreciate.
Sometimes you do have to dispatch a rat. Now when I was growing up,
it was either the snap traps or it was the glue traps.
The snap traps always felt violent,
but they felt like at least the rat died quickly,
which I think is what you would want to do. The humane thing to do.
There's the glue trap which as a kid I remember they were used a couple of times
when I was growing up and it was kinda miserable.
You'd see the rat like breathing against the glue and it was oh,
it just kind of, even today just kind of makes me shudder.
And I remember having to throw those rats away and dispatch them and I really
didn't like it.
And so what I've decided to do is given the fact that I will try to protect my
garden from rats, by prevention and mitigation,
I will do some extermination to make sure that they're not munching on
everything that I'm trying to grow here and eat for my family and my friends.
And even some donations out here in the community.
I'm going to do some extermination. If I'm going to do that,
I want to make sure that it's the most humane and quickest kill possible,
which is why I've moved over to something called the Automatic Trap.
Before we get into what the Automatic Trap is,
and they are the sponsor of today's video,
what you have to think about is where do you actually place the trap?
How do you make sure rats are going to be at the place that you place it?
And how do you make sure you're actually going to catch the rats?
Remember they're neophobic - they don't like new things.
If you just slap a new trap up, they're going to be like, okay, nice try dude.
I'm out of here. I'm going to go eat something else in your garden, right?
So garden is a pretty big competition for a trap.
So what you want to do is you take these little lure tasters,
which come in the kit,
and it's got a little bit of bait in here and you just break it.
So you crack it like that and then you pin it to a couple different
locations. So I'm going to put one here next to the shed.
And what you're doing is you're going to look for bite marks along this,
that's how you know. You leave it out for three days, you look,
see if you see light bite marks, medium, or really heavy biting.
That's how you know if rats are coming to this area.
And you can slowly start to then introduce the trap,
which I'll show you in just a second. So I'm going to pin this one up here.
So I already know where the rats are on my property,
but this is what you would do. You'd go around to different areas.
Take your best guess.
Things that are far away from other competitive food sources,
like a compost bin or a garden, you want to test those areas.
See if they're there, move it around till you find those bite marks.
THEN you get into using the trap. So here's the trap,
here's everything you need for the trap.
It's actually one of the more interesting designs I've ever seen for a rat trap.
And trust me, I've tried just about every single one out there.
So it's called the Automatic Trap A24. You have this cap here.
This is where you put your bait. So let's do that first. You can slide this off.
They give you a bait pack. You can also use a custom pack like this,
put your bait in just the top here and slide it in.
I'm going to use the one that they included. Let's see what it smells like.
That's what it looks like. It smells kind of like coconut oil.
So something that rats definitely would like to go for.
So you just want to affix it in there. Okay, our bait is in.
We'll put the cover back on. We'll affix it.
Now how does the trap actually work? You see this little CO2 canister here.
You just remove this,
you screw this into this base right here and that's going to immediately
pressurize the system. So I'm all the way in.
I just heard it fill up. Now the way this works,
you can see a little bit of the bait down there, right?
But there's also a little bar. The bait's actually covering it right now.
But that bar, when it triggers,
this orange piece right here will fly across and it will hit whatever is
in its place. So I've got a little cucumber here. I don't think it will fit.
So let me go get something different to show you how this works.
I'm just going to use a stick.
And what I'm doing here is I'm going to trigger this little bar right here and
watch what happens. You gotta be kinda careful here obviously.
Whooo, that scared me! So anything that that hits is going to immediately die,
which is why it's called the humane trap.
Given the fact you're going to kill the rat,
that's probably the fastest and most humane way to do it.
Now there's a couple other things that you can do here.
You've got this little counter that you can put on.
So I can slide this on here and it'll know if it has deployed the trap.
Cause sometimes you'll have like another rodent will come through and eat.
So you can press this button here.
And you've got a counter here that'll count every time this is deployed.
But let's go ahead and put this in the garden. So I have the trap here.
I just added the base that came with the kit.
So the base just allows you not to have to mount it to a wall.
You certainly could just take this piece and mount it directly to a wall like
this and a rat or a mouse or whatever could come up in here.
The base just lets me set it on the ground. I know this area already has rats.
All I need to do is just place it here. Of course, pre-feeding the area,
making sure the rat feels that it's safe in this area is a good idea.
Remember they're neophobic.
But all that's going to happen is they're going to come up,
investigate the trap. They're going to go up.
Remember the bait is up in this section right here. So they're going to go up,
they'll use that little metal bar and they'll pull it and it will trigger the
hammer that will come in like this. And then they'll just drop down right here.
So you'll know, cause you'll come out and you'll actually see them.
But if you don't, you do have this counter that knows if it deployed or not.
So at least you'll know that something triggered it.
Whether they somehow got out, unlikely,
or they got killed and then something else came and took it away,
you'll know with the counter.
So all I have to do is just let this trap work its magic.
Sometimes in the garden,
you do have to take matters into your own hands and actually control and
exterminate some pests,
whether it's a tomato hornworm or an aphid control problem. And with rats,
something I've had a problem with here at the Homestead and it got so out of
whack that I needed something to control. If you're going to do it,
I feel like yo've got to do one that's going to kill the animal in the most
humane way possible, which is what I've found Automatic Trap to be. Also,
incredibly effective. It's just the best one that I've found.
As far as disposal of the animal, the best thing to do, first of all,
check your local laws, your local ordinances and see what they recommend.
You can also bury it way deeper than any pest could dig up.
Maybe like a foot and a half deep or so, completely fine.
I personally probably wouldn't toss it into the compost pile,
not something I really want to be mixing back into my soil,
but I know it's been done before. Just not something I would recommend.
When it comes to the garden and managing pests,
sometimes whether it's a tomato hornworm, whether it's an aphid,
whether it's rats and mice,
you do have to take matters into your own hand and do a little bit of culling of
that population. Because we have to remember,
our gardens aren't even natural ecosystems.
We're pulling in plants from all around the world, places that evolved,
you know, in South Africa and Asia and Europe,
and we're all growing them right here in our garden.
So our garden itself isn't really a natural ecosystem.
It makes sense that sometimes pest populations might get a little bit out of
control.
So I would go with the Automatic Trap if you do want to get rid of rats, mice,
anything like that. With that said,
I really hope this helped understand how to deal with rats and rodents on a
fundamental level from prevention to mitigation to control,
if you really do need to do that. And hope you enjoyed it,
good luck in the garden and keep on growing.
Testing, testing, testing, testing.
Testing, continuing on with the lab.
Continue on continuing on.