Experts Urge Homeowners to Place Cotton Balls in Their Garden This Summer for One Key Reason
The arrival of summertime is a call for homeowners to safeguard their garden. You notice a beady-eyed rat squeezing its fuzzy body through a hole in your garden wall, hops down on the grass, and crawls towards the trash bin. Rodents, like rats, do not arrive at invitation. But once these uninvited guests make their way into your house or garden, it’s back-breaking to get these gnarly creatures out. But there’s a way, shared by experts at Ark Wildlife, to get these rodents out, and it requires nothing but a cheap household staple: cotton balls. Cotton balls dipped in a scented essential oil can ward off these pests in no time. But why is it so hard?
One reason why it is so difficult to drive these rodents, like rats, from the garden is that they reproduce and propagate too quickly. Once they start breeding, they multiply quickly than rabbits. MayDay Pest Services explains that a 3- to 4-month-old rat becomes so sexually active that it mates with the female as many as “five hundred times within just 6 hours of meeting,” which occurs fifteen times each year. If their mating is not restrained and if there are no predators nearby to eat them up, a pair of rats can breed as many as “two thousand young rats” in just a year. The same goes with mice.
“One female mouse can have 5 to 10 litters each year, and each litter consists of 3 to 14 mice. Breeding occurs throughout the year, and a mouse requires only about nineteen days per gestation period,” the website explains. So once these woolly cooties sneak inside your territory and invade those shadowy nooks and crannies, you’ll have a hard time getting your space liberated from their invasion. The moment you slip away from the garden, they’ll dig and burrow holes in the floor, gnaw at the stems and the bird seeds, and smash those tender flowers with their sharp, scissorlike teeth. But there’s good news. These rodents, particularly rats, have a heightened sensitivity to the sense of smell.
According to Cascade Pest Control, the bodies of rats are equipped with over 1,500 smell receptors that are quick to trigger at the sensation of an odor or aroma. Their nasal passages are studded with these hair-like receptors as well as olfactory neurons that generate the response to the stimulus of smell. This heightened sense of smell is a reason why cotton balls soaked in essential oils work so miraculously to repel them. “Dousing cotton wool balls with smelly essential oils, bleach, or vinegar and stuffing them as far as possible into their holes can work wonders,” Ark Wildlife says. Some of the oils, they suggest, include peppermint, eucalyptus, and citronella, to name a few. “Birds and hedgehogs will not be harmed, while rats will detest and avoid the smell,” they describe.
Apart from the essential oils, other smells that deter rats could be mint, garlic, lavender, bleach, chilli powder, and vinegar. As for the cotton ball hack, though effective, it may not always be the best-suited option for repelling these pesky rodents. "Although most people think of insects as something to be avoided, many of them are so important to the environment," Corrie Moreau, director and curator of the Cornell University Insect Collection, told Insider.