Rat Exclusion Day

One of the joys/responsibilities of home ownership is vigilance against unwanted intruders. In this case, rats! A downside of my organic vegetable garden is that it attracts not just butterflies, pollinators and humans, but also less desirable creatures like raccoons and rats! The raccoons seem to have lost interest since I got rid of the fountain where they were washing their food, but the rats! Yuck! Luckily, the nice guys from WeCare Pest Solutions are here to help. The first step is to make sure they hadn’t gotten inside anywhere. WeCare crawled under the house and into the attic and sealed up all possibly entry points. Our property is a mini-compound of three buildings - the main house, a detached garage with a storage room, and a separate studio.

See our cute little storage room? The front section of the garage has a slab foundation, but the storage room turns out to be the big problem. It has a post and pier foundation with some screening around the sides, but mostly open to the air. That might work for raccoons and skunks, but not rats! See the tunnels? They form a rat freeway to the vegetable garden. WeCare will have to dig trenches around the storage room and bury heavy duty screens 18 inches down. Here are the “before” photos. I’ll let you know how it turns out. I hope they can save my rosebushes!