How to Keep Raccoons Out of your Home Vegetable Garden

I love the commercial on TV where a lady is at her back door and she is calling for her cat that she had let out. Using the normal calls for domesticated cats she tries fervently to retrieve her pet. Unbeknownst to her, due to her poor eye sight, she thinks she is letting in her cat when it turns out to actually be a raccoon. This commercial holds true to life exactly what you could be doing with raccoons in your own vegetable garden. Your vegetable garden is an inviting source since it gives them easy access to the food they need.

Issues with raccoons most often occur in areas close to the woods, a forest and sometimes in the city if you live near an alleyway with lots of dumpsters. In order to get the best solutions for raccoons I once turned to the experts on our vegetable gardening Facebook fan page. Here is what they came up with.

Traps
Traps are a good way to remove not only raccoons from your home vegetable garden, but other rodents as well. They are fairly inexpensive and can be used over and over. Many of the respondents to the post suggested using dog food as bait as that seemed to work well for them. Once trapped drive the animal at least 10 miles from your home to a wooded area and release it. Just be careful when you do. Raccoons are very protective of their young, in the event you trap their babies as well.

Animal Control
If trapping the animals yourself is not appealing many areas have animal control that is available to them. A phone call or two to your local animal control and they can take care of the problem for you. They might even have the cages to rent so the raccoons can be trapped and they will get rid of them for you.

Hot Pepper Spray/Powder
This one is also popular for squirrel control as well and that is to either use hot pepper powder/flakes and surround the perimeter of your garden with it or crush hot peppers and mix them with water, blend thoroughly and put in a spray bottle to create a pepper spray that you can also spray the perimeter of your garden with. You will have to reapply after every rainfall. The hot pepper works as a good repellent.

Water Sprinkler on a Motion Detector
This was my favorite option of all and that was to put a water sprinkler on that would spray water once a connected motion detector sensed something was moving in the garden. It is safe to both the gardener and the animals of course and all respondents that used this method claimed the raccoon problems were gone within a week. Just remember to shut it off when you are heading to the garden or you may become a victim of your own trap.

If you have an issue with raccoons or other animals that are causing problems in your home vegetable garden then put one or all four of these methods to work for you. You could be raccoon free in no time.

About the Author
Mike is the administrator for the largest vegetable gardening group on Facebook. You can join the vegetable gardening group for free.