Strawberry-eating mice

[KrisWW]

Help - my strawberry bed is lush and productive with loads of huge berries just starting to ripen. But the mice are beating me to each and every one. I've set traps and the lab puppy has developed a bad habit of eating the mice the traps catch. :tard: Revolting creature.

Apart from transplanting them into grobags and hanging them off the fence, how does one stop the little buggers scoffing the lot?

[MKG]

I can't offer any practical advice other than the fact that mice can climb a vertical fence - easily.

[Thomzo]

?

That'll keep the lab puppy entertained as well. Two uses for the price of one - even better if you can persuade that nuisance tom from a few doors down to do the job. You won't even have to feed him or pay the vets bills

Zoe

[Annpan]

Get a cat, sorry but I believe this is the most sure way of ridding yourself of mice - you could try to get some dirty cat litter (for the smells) and spread it about but in all honesty I wouldn't fancy piles of kitty litter either

A cat will sort it out.

posted at same time as Zoe - great minds

[MKG]

Unless, of course, cats like strawberries?????

[Enormous Sage]

Mice : the only thing I have found that works are the old "Tom and Jerry" style wooden traps. Repellent, conkers, fancy ultrasound devices : mice laugh at them.
But if you do use the traps, I guess you would have to bait them with something more tasty than strawberries...

Only thing I can suggest is that you try to find out where they are living and get them at source.
Or get a cat (as mentioned)

[Turf cutter man]

We have a cat that sleeps on our strawberry patch. The mice just wait til the cat is not there!!

[JeremyinCzechRep]

I had mice in my house last year and traps baited with cheese weren't successful but someone recommended chocolate and it was very effective. I still get mice in the garden but the house has been mouse-free for a while now.

[Annpan]

I have heard peanut butter works well in traps... but I still stand by my Cat remedy.

During the summer, out in the garden my cat brings the mice to my feet... and looks lovingly at me... then munches the whole thing, including the bones.... walks away licking her chops in search of more.

[pumpy]

That's the only thing 'bout our cats that i dis-like. They'll bring home a chick, drop it at your feet, & before you have time to react, they'll pick it up again, run up the garden, & proceed to bite the chicks head off before devouring the rest. Hey ho, i s'pose that's nature, as humans bred it.

[Rohen]

I have strawbs in the green house I tend to put down poison in a cardboard box

I also have a dangerous spring back rat trap in there Scares the life out of me

[Annpan]

See, I worry about poison because what is to stop a mouse getting out of the box and perhaps the greenhouse before dying and being eaten by a bird or someone's pet cat.

I can't bare to think about my neigbours using poison for mice

[Rohen]

These are the mice on the allotment

They are field mice and they go and die in their nest...

[Enormous Sage]

See, I worry about poison because what is to stop a mouse getting out of the box and perhaps the greenhouse before dying and being eaten by a bird or someone's pet cat.

I can't bare to think about my neigbours using poison for mice

If you use poison, they also crawl under the floorboards in the house and die sometimes, which leaves a novel aroma drifting round the place for a week or two, followed by a plague of flies.
Yes, I speak from experience.

[Millymollymandy]

I must be lucky (ha ha) because my mice (mulots in French) are the burrowing kind which don't eat my fruit or veg but just tunnel everywhere. They particularly like tunneling under the strawberrries leaving their roots danging in space. I spend more time stomping soil down and refilling all their blasted holes than I do anything else in the veg patch, and the worst is when they tunnel right through a patch where I've just sown seed or through a row of seedlings, leaving them sitting up in the air on mounds. They need to die. Cats are no use whatsoever for underground mice. And not all cats are any use for above ground mice either!