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Natural Family Living
Keeping Pests Away Naturally
By Bob and Ruth Haag
Why do pests want to live in your house and yard? It's because you have made things too nice for them, forgetting lessons that the Victorians had once learned.
Have you ever looked at pictures of houses during the mid to late 1800s? Their landscaping usually looks a little plain, mostly because they did not have bushes planted closely around their foundations, as houses do in the present day.
Have you ever noticed that the porch ceilings of houses in the late 1800s were usually painted robin-egg blue?
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As you stock up on your mouse poison and your bug spray, do you ever wonder what people did before such things existed?
Animals and insects each have their own preferred environments, in which they are most comfortable setting up housekeeping. They need a source of food and a secure place to have their young. Unknowingly, we often provide them with their preferred environment.
You can change the vegetation around your yard and repel some pests.
Mice like to be in your house mostly because there is a nice source of food: your pantry. They prefer to enter houses on the ground level, and can enter through extremely small holes. They do not like to enter a house along an exposed path. So, the bushes and plants that you put around your house make a really nice cover for mice. They can scoot along and not be noticed. Now you can understand why houses in the mid to late 1800s did not have any plantings close to the foundation.
Deer like to live and graze in areas that are transitional between fields and dense woods. These areas are called ecotones. Many of the plants that naturally grow in such transitional ecotone areas, and successfully resist being eaten by the deer, have thorns. Deer have found that many suburban yards are similar to such ecotones, and provide a suitable habitat for them, usually minus the thorns. If you are in such a suburban area and want to keep deer out of your yard, you will need to either cultivate plants that are not appealing to deer, or install a very high fence.
The current overabundance of deer in the Midwest is also due to our removal of their natural predators, wolves. This augments our diligent work to increase their preferred habitat, the ecotones that we call sub-divisions.
Canadian geese like to be near water, but they dislike tall grass. If you do not mow around your pond, the geese may come for an overnight visit, but will be less likely to take up residence.
Along with changing vegetation, you can also adapt colors to repel some pests.
Mud wasps like to make their homes on a nice high place, like your porch roof, and be near to a good source of mud. However, mud wasps do not seem to like the color robin-egg blue. Some speculate that it resembles the sky, and makes them feel that they are too much out in the open. When I painted my porch ceiling robin-egg blue, like the Victorians, mud wasps did not build their nests there.
Yellowjackets and honey-bees really like the color yellow. If you approach them wearing yellow, they are more likely to land on you than if you wear white. This explains to me why little blond children seem to get more stings than little dark-haired children, although I haven't done a formal survey.
A little understanding of where animals want to live can help you to create environments where they won't come.
About the authors: The principals of HaagEnviro, Ruth and Bob Haag, have been cleaning up hazardous waste sites for 17 years. They know where to look for wastes, and what to worry about. Bob is a hydrogeologist, and Ruth is a natural resources scientist. Their monthly newspaper, A Sandusky Bay Journal, often carries articles related to their environmental experiences. Visit them at www.haagenviro.com.
VegFamily Resources: Visit the VegFamily Shopping Guide for organic products companies that support VegFamily.
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