March 7, 2025, 2:30 pm | Read time: 3 minutes
Rats are nimble climbers, good swimmers, and have fine noses. This comes in handy when they are looking for food. The problem here is that they don’t stop at gardens — how are they supposed to know that this zone is off-limits to them? To make it clear to the animals that they are not welcome, you can keep them away with a few tips.
The rat’s reputation is anything but positive. After all, they can transmit diseases via their droppings. This can be hazardous to the health of humans and pets. You can keep rats out of your garden with the following tips.
1. Remove Food Sources
Like other wild animals, rats are always on the lookout for food. They also find their way into gardens. After all, the table here is sometimes richly laid. Vegetable patches, compost heaps, and seeds and kernels that are placed in the garden for squirrels and birds also welcome rats.
To keep rats away from the garden, you should remove potential food sources. Food scraps should not be stored openly or thrown on the compost heap. You should also only offer bird food in secure feeders.
2. Secure the Compost Heap
When it comes to compost heaps, to deter rats from the garden, it’s crucial to be mindful of what you discard in the compost. Meat and fish scraps, for example, should not be thrown on the compost. Kitchen waste is garbage for humans but a welcome source of food for rats.
Dispose of these only in a closed composter — this is the second key point. It is important to secure the compost heap. Securing the heap doesn’t mean using a heavy padlock but rather ensuring it’s closed off and free of openings that rodents could exploit to access the compost.
3. Securely Close Garbage Cans
Similar to the compost heap, you should always close the garbage can tightly so that rats cannot climb in. It is also advisable to place the garbage cans on a solid surface.
4. Eliminate Open Water Sources
Like humans, rats need water regularly to survive. To avoid attracting them to your garden, you should make sure that there are no open sources of water. This includes, for example, water bowls, buckets of rainwater, and open rain barrels.
Incidentally, it is not only rats that use open water points in the garden. They are also an ideal breeding ground for insects, especially mosquitoes. If you don’t want to be bitten by numerous mosquitoes in your own garden in summer, you should remove open water points as quickly as possible.
5. Close Off Access Points
If you find rat holes in your garden, you should close them up. You should also seal any gaps in the house. Grids with small meshes no larger than one centimeter are ideal. Rats cannot get through these and cannot bite through them.
6. Rely on the Right Scent
Thanks to their fine noses with around 1,000 different olfactory receptors, rats can distinguish odors particularly well. Pleasant smells are a signal: There’s food here! Unpleasant odors, on the other hand, drive the rodents away. Clove oil and vinegar, for example, are among the scents that these small mammals do not like. If you spread the scent in a targeted manner, you can keep rats out of the garden.
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7. Encourage Natural Enemies
Rats also want to lead a peaceful life. If you make the garden uncomfortable for them with natural predators, they will certainly not move in. Nesting boxes can be used to attract owls and birds of prey. Cats and dogs also have a deterrent effect.