Rats Love Vegetables 

Hey Bruce, are we going to get a general overview video of the garden soon? Like RED and what it’s about, how the goals have changed, your background and methodology. I went back and watched your first few videos recently, and I feel like they might benefit from an update. You’ve also got way better writing and production quality now.

That cat is too well fed!

You have introduced the rats to farming. Perhaps they will soon try to grow their own crops and compete with your business.

I've had rats decimate my tomato crops and I've had to step up my eradication techniques. Last year most of my cherry tomatoes disappeared and they would take one or two bites of of the other tomatoes, leaving them unmarketable.

Maybe a "lookout" for birds of prey (wooden T structure, 2-4m heigh) could further help with the rats.

In the oil plantations here in Malaysia we build tall birdhouses for owls as one of many ways for rodent control.

7:08 A relative of many apex-predators enjoying lunch with the pests it is meant to hunt

Congratulations on your milestone video. I always look forward to watching them as they are well spoken, clear and insightful. Thank you, and here's to many more years.

The ease of finding yummy foods had led the rat population to increase creating more pressure on your gardens. The flamer idea is something I'd never heard of and appreciate that you shared it with us.

I had mice. I switched burying my compost. For each kitchen bucket I dig a new hole in a free spot in the garden or somewhere I want to build soil. This got rid of them and they haven't been back since (about three years).

My experience with gophers closely parallels yours with rats. Early on, I thought they were cute and harmless, and tolerated them, until they killed a couple of my favorite fruit trees. Now I'm merciless. The gas and smoke method doesn't work in our porous desert soils, so I just set lots of traps and pray. Three things that we have moved to recently with great success is raised beds, totes, and tule. Congratulations on 100 videos! We try to never miss one!

Congratulations on the 100 video milestone! You're one of my favorite gardening youtube channels for videos just like this one. I can't recall many of my other channels discussing rats in the compost or some of the less "flashy" parts of gardening. I also really appreciate your commitment to trials and data, which are shared with amazing amounts of context in your 10-11 minute videos. If only we had similar climates haha. Thank you for all the knowledge you've shared!

What you are doing is important and sincerely appreciated by people far beyond your local community, Bruce. Congratulations on your 100+ videos. It's been almost five years now, and the positive impact you have had on thousands of people like me is doubtlessly substantial. Thank you!

My Grandfather, when I was a boy and I'm 51 years old, used to grow lots and lots of mint herbs around the house, barn. In the Fall, he used to harvest the mint herbs and sprinkle the mint in the root cellar, and his basement. He said that rodents hate the smell of mint. He also had a Jack Russell Terrier and they are bred to kill to kill rodents. P.S. I never had a farm so I never did this technique, I just watched my Grandfather. Great videos, big fan and keep the good work. Just an idea to see if it helps.

Hello, Red Gardens here is a list of stuff you can use to try to eradicate the rats. Some of them might be ones you already tried. 1. Slingshot-can get this for cheap 2. Air rifle-can get one around $130 3. Plant an area just four the rats and make the garden less accessible 4. Snares 5. Use a mink and net system. The mink system is wildly used on some farms and can kill all of the rats in a week or 2. 6.Help the natural predators. Plant cat nip, feed prey birds, rescue wild mink, etc Hope this helps and anyone who sees this like it so Red Gardens can see if easier!

I have really enjoyed you logical unbiased view over the years. Congratulation for making it this long. The modification to each garden and different approach you have taken is inspiring. While I understand this project is not about most profitable gardening method, but rather a learning opportunity to compare different methods. However if needed I think succession of lettuce crop through out the year and their high value sale will bring additional funding to this project. Approach similar to Charles Dowding due to similarity of weather patterns and mild summer temperatures. Best of luck!

This cat had one job to do...

congrats on a hundred, and thank you for sharing. this is one of my favorite channels. Love your production, and the content wonderful.

Congrats on your milestone! And yes, man, rats can really be a problem. Nice strategies, despite you not wanting to do them. Sometimes composting the rats themselves is good too. I feel it's a nice way to use them again and actually benefit your gardens. Especially when it's something you don't want to do. Makes me feel a little better.

🙋‍♀️hi im broken I was looking for information on the rodent problem and glad to find your video telling The Truth! I dont think there is any solution to them they are out in their droves All Night eating veg and fruit then get to work on our homes lofts garages sheds greenhouses cars and more less crops are being grown out in the fields its pointless we cannot control them guess i will just grow flowers from now on.not a defeatest normally Love all your excellent Videos Bruce well done!😊 Ireland

I have a gamo phox .22 calibre rifle which has a ten round magazine, also comes with a scope and silencer. Only £500. If I were in Ireland I would be happy to help! 👍

I completely gave up on tomatoes because of rats. last year I didnt get a sinlge tomato from my 6 plants, they were eating them entirely before they ever fully ripened.

Congratulations on making 100 videos I have watched and enjoyed all of them! Keep up the Great work!

Congratulations on the success of your channel, it's an absolute treasure for me, and I refer to these videos on a regular basis. I'm going to patrion right now. Thanks for the reminder.

sow patches of sacrificial crops to distract the rats far away form your patch as well as dumping a lot of birdseed to distract the rats from your microgreen patch. Hopefully the birdseed will sprout which will attract the rats.

This might sound like a bit of a strange idea but have you ever thought about ferrets?

Great video, I love your integrated approach to pests. Shame that there aren't any snakes in Ireland. A well trained dog could be a solution possibly, though it might discourage other natural enemies from hunting there.

Wow that was disappointing, a cat in the compost pile with the rat! 😂 We had trouble with voles last year, they are probably half of our fall beets! They hollowed them out from underneath so from the surface they looked perfect but when I went to pick them I only had the skin left! We’ve been trapping them through the winter, I don’t know if we’re making a dent yet.

Congrats on 100 videos and soon enough 75,000 subscribers. You're doing great work Bruce. I've just been going back through your videos from the beginning. Sometimes we binge watch Netflix, but RU-vid gardening shows are also great. Calming, peaceful, and we learn something. Thanks Bruce, looking forward to all your future videos in this upcoming season.

You should try one of those 'Walk the Plank" rat traps with a bucket. They are really effective and can catch a huge amount in a single night.

I would be inviting the local Irish terrier boys down for the day

Congratulations on 100 videos, looking forward to more!

I have been a Patreon for, I dont even remember, longer than three year by now? I thoroughly enjoy these videos and there is so, so, so much to learn. Thanks Bruce.

Congratulations on the 100th video. You've got rats, I've got voles that eat the roots of my cabbages and some other plant families. I couldn't get myself to eliminate them they way you do with the flameweeder, although I totally understand your dilemma. Instead I fill the burrows with water, lots of it, and hope that it will make my garden as unhospitable as possible. But admittedly I have never seen voles eat my peas or tomatoes, one somehow has to admire rats, they do seem very clever.

Haha wow, that white cat was just oblivious to that rat.

Congratulations 100 videos of information which is going to be alive as long as RU-vid is awesome. May be generations down will also find it useful.

I have had problems with rats before. Actively destroying their tunnels and setting traps every single day helped me dealing with it. But it took months and a lot of frustration, because they are amazingly clever. I felt a bit bad though,. Sadly, it is unsustainable not to deal with them around populated areas. Good luck keeping their numbers down!

Thank you for your hard work, and making great content. Here’s to the next 100 videos!

Damn. You are a genius.

I like the propane torch idea. Thanks for the tip

Congrats on 100th video. Your channel is amazing in how you present information and data. Please continue, wish more RU-vidrs would adapt your style of straight forward approach. Cheers from Canada

Congratulations on your 100th video! I enjoy watching your videos because I get a lot of information and practical tips on farming. Wishing you more success in the coming years!

I use a similar method for rat control. I find as many nest holes as possible, and shove a signal flare down each of the holes and let it run. It fills the holes with smoke, and kills the rats. I only do it after rain when the ground is good and damp.

Have you considered investigating the feasibility of Black Soldier Flies as compost processors...? The success of these small grubs has been so great for my composting that I am now forever seeking newer sources organic scraps for the 44 gallon drum that I have converted to be my BSF feeder. I use the grubs as feed additives for my fish in the Aquaponics system and for the chickens.

I put sunflower heads in my barn to dry them out...big mistake rats definitely love sunflower seeds.

This is a problem I do not have in my Alberta garden thankfully.

Well done Bruce. I think that I have seen all of your videos and enjoyed every one of them and learned so much from them. I had a problem with mice on my allotment but managed to grow the things they liked higher up or in places it’s more difficult to get into. You are quite right to be aggressive with rats , otherwise you would lose too much vegetables.

Thanks for sharing this video

A pond for grass snakes might keep the population down, although I believe they prefer amphibians as prey, they might take newborn & juvenile mice & rats, thus tempering the increase in population of local rodents. Terriers were used to keep rats in check as well & more of a man made approach if you have one available. I also keep chickens by my allotment & this offers the local wildlife another source of sustenance with the compost located nearby as well. The list of animals willing to test my patience & help themselves to our produce is seemingly endless. I humanely trap (& release) rabbits & I've seen birds of prey nearby & with nest boxes I hope to attract smaller birds to keep the bugs under control. There's always something looking for a free meal.

Voles really decimated my beets last year. They helped themselves to a few carrots also, intolerable to loose my work to those vermin.

Great channel lots of great info had the same problem but also had to deal with woodchucks . Tried traps got a raccoon and possum in large trap and chipmunk in small trap. Poured hot wood coals you can do charcoal into holes for both woodchuck and rat,mice and voles. Kills pest but also shows if you missed other holes as smoke will come out .

Thank you for your honest and informative videos.

I love watching your videos as I always learn something. Many thanks :)

LMAO! Perfect solution, between me and my neighbors, we have 10 cats. No rat problem.

My biggest problem here in Indiana are Meadow voles they love to eat my carrots and sweet potatoes. Really enjoy your videos and have learned quite a bit from them over the years

please continue. I love your style

I love vegetables

I have tomato "weeds" everywhere on my urban lot.

Rats cleaned out all my lettuce, broccoli, chard, Chinese cabbage, and eat my chicken feed here in north Texas. I have a critter cam and can see them doing it but haven’t found a solution yet to drop the population. They can clean out a crop overnight.

It would be interesting how this affected the tomato variety experiment, as you would think they would eat the most delicious ones. Oh, if you can dig up enough dirt under the tomatoes to grow the seeds in another spot, and have a new experiment to breed together all the varieties to make a more resilient tomato by virtue of having 50ish varieties as seed stock.

You can blame St. Patrick for this. If you had a good population of rat snakes you would not have such a problem. I've long heard the warnings about cooked food or meat in the compost pile, ignored it and never had a rat in a compost pile. I've never seen anything attract rats so much as a store of chicken feed. I have had rats destroy a crop of 200 Seminole pumpkins in a very short time.

The rats really enjoyed the cabbages and tomatoes in our community garden.

you need some terriers or stoats or something.

Same problems with rats here in Eastern TN. Started in year 3.

Unusual i know, bit this video gave me great ideas of things to grow for my pet rats this year.

Cheers to 100 more! (Videos, not rats) 😂

A couple of feral cats should take care of your problem. They can be incentivized to stay in the garden with the occasional feed but once they adopt your yard they'll stay there and survive without much input from you. They will impact the local bird population though.

If you have any spare seed or sprouts after planting, it might be a good experiment to give the rats their own mini garden close to the compost. Gives them less of a reason to forage farther than that.

Looks like you have a live fertilizer problem, I just setup 10 or more rat traps in the garden and for a night or 2 I keep my window open and as soon as I hear a trap go off I’ll go out there and put the rat in a bucket reset the traps and I’ll get 10 or so rats a night , then just dig a hole and bury them and plant a pumpkin or corn on top of the rats and THEY LOVE IT and you don’t have to fertilize that plant all season, I grew some big healthy pumpkin plants with huge nice pumpkins and never used any fertilizer but the rats that were buried underneath, or bury them next to fruit trees , that takes care of the rats for a while til more move in but yea try it !

They eat the wiring harness of my car.

I catch rats. They compost down really well, adding nutrients to my growing media.

I suspect the smells of the compost initially attracted them and since they had such nice living conditions they over populated and found food sources nearby (your gardens). I think you are going to have to turn those piles more often and keep the freshest stuff enclosed in something rat proof like hardware cloth for the first week or so.

The balance between one species and another is very interesting. The rats are killing the mice and probably other small animals. Here it is foxes and rabbits. One year it is one and then the next, the other. Nature has a way, but I would completely agree- the rats MUST go.

I was wondering if you had considered growing mushrooms. I think you could stretch more food out of what you have grown by processing some of the non edible parts of plants into edible mushrooms. Also I have heard really good things about incorporating the leftovers of the process into your compost or into the garden itself. It can also give you something to do when the gardens dont produce as much and it should help fill the hunger gap.

Would you not let a few working cats roam garden ✌️😎

The issue is the compost is allowing them to eat and breed easily, but then the new rats dont have enough food or territory in the compost so they are pushed out and look for homes and food elsewhere. Removing the seeding source of food should lower the overall population. Its the same reason people should not feed stray cats. Well fed stray cats....make more stay cats that then.....need more food and then.......make more stray cats. The original feeding source needs to be lowered or eliminated. In a way feeding stray animals actually makes the situation worse for more animals. I suggest adopting the policy of the only good rat is a dead rat.

That's gardening and Trash Metal together. Love it!

Me l love rats because they're cute,adorable,intelligent and amazing creature like bats either that's wild or domestic rats.Along with rats l also like beavers.

Unfortunately, rats welcome your compost toleration and colonise from there. You could speak to a local air rifle club and invite a member or 2 every few weeks to do a cull. Am sure they would be more than happy to help out.

Flamin rats

I had a similar problem with rats. It started in our chicken coop. The rats started nesting nearby, eating the chickens food . Then as they continued reproducing, more nests popped up in my gardens. They would burrow and nest in the potato rows, and eat every potato that grew. Increasingly, they would move on to the next vegetable they found appetizing. We tried several methods, but ultimately, rat poison blocks strategically placed in the winter wiped them out. Although, our small community of close neighbors, also treated their coops and barns at the same time. Our cooperation that winter ultimately removed the rat problem. Unfortunately, the nature of rodents is to be ravenous, and without predation, they are overwhelming 🐀

lol, there is no safe level of rats to keep around your food crops. eliminate and keep eliminated. spring traps are cheap and easy to use. would you tolerate a certain number of rats in the kitchen?

Dead rats make a great addition to compost piles. We have to clean citrus off the ground to keep the rat population under control and off of our roof. Thank you for sharing.

Rodent populations have a tendency to suddenly explode, so my money is on that. I will not compost food waste, not even vegetable peels in the garden compost. I have a separate closed and insulated bin for that. A freezer would work, but mice can enter drainage holes unless they're meshed

You could use traps , but if you do cover them with paper or something like that, as they will figure out what the traps are after a while.

You should get a couple of rat terriers

so how do you know you find "all the other entrances to the rat's burrow" ? Do you see smoke escaping when you try your weedkiller trick and then close up that hole?

Congratulations!

Hi i watched a video from NZ and a lady gardener converted an old washing machine drum stainless u know into like a rotating composting drum she put corn imto the drum anf when rat went im they found lower eas oit which they had to pass thru big trap killef instantly next day she droped it into composting tyre bin i m not sure i would like to be that hands on but she is providing an attractant ???

Have you tried hiring a Pied Piper? :D

Our problem is with field volves.

Another interesting video. Has there been less damage in the extensive garden? Less cover than say intensive. I have to say I’ve watched many of your videos many times. Very happy to be a Patreon. Would be interested what’s happening outside Black Plot poly. All the best. From north east Scotland.

I used to think I would be as furious as Mr. McGregor if something were munching the plants in my little garden. One year a native Idaho cottontail wandered onto the property, and I was actually thrilled, since my property is a self-declared wildlife sanctuary. The little bunny did no damage to my crops as far as I could tell, and I saw it eating weeds instead. It hung out for months, and then we didn't see it anymore. The annoying thing about rats, in the case of Red Gardens, and squirrels, in my case, is that they are not content to finish their meal, but instead they go from plant to plant just nibbling what they think is the best part and then they move on to the next one. I think my squirrels are true epicureans, they have such a finely developed sense of taste and smell that they find only a small portion of the apple to be just right, and then they discard the fruit and move on to the next one. But in the case of the rats, maybe they just nibble the part most easily reached, since there are plenty of handy targets all in a row. Here at my place I am just cleaning up the result of winter's depredation, and trimming the sprouts off the top of the branches of the old apple tree. The trimming is slow going... the ladder rungs hurt my feet despite my work boots, and I have to move the ladder a lot since my reach is limited. I can't use a two-handed tool like loppers or a pole pruner while on the ladder, that just isn't safe, so I am limited to pruning shears and saws. The tree is at least one hundred years old, and you can't wrap your arms around the trunk, and it produces the best apples I have ever tasted! I am a bit biased, I am sure. The tree has suffered from a power line being strung overhead back in the day, and when I moved here there were jagged limbs sticking out here and there, possibly the result of breaking from a snow load. There are hollow places in the trunk, and a fungus grows on it, but it seems to have responded to my ministrations.

Ferrets.

My bane in the garden are the birds.

Just remember rats 🐀 are delicious 🤤 seriously 😳 they can be add to your cook 👨‍🍳 pot on a regular basis

I have been having a lot of issues with groundhogs in my home garden.

Where I work, we have a large warehouse with a lot of fruit. One time a couple of years ago, a rat got inside (we think hiding in a shipment of watermelon). We had all manner of fruit and vegetables available in the warehouse that it could have gotten to, but out of everything the product it really wanted was Hawaiian papaya. I believe the volatiles of ripe fruit are incredibly attractive to them so it doesn't surprise me that they'd like tomatoes. This is hard, I would love to be a totally veganic gardener and not harm any living things, but at a certain point if you don't deal with the issue you're just going to be growing a rat's dinner. Large amounts of vegetables in one place really kind of creates this inherent imbalance. Hopefully death by carbon monoxide is humane and they just fall asleep. My mom had this experience with poison bait -- she knew there was a rat in the backyard and garage, so she had put out bait. But then she found a rat seizing and not totally killed after eating the bait, and she felt so bad for it that she actually nursed it back to health in her basement before taking it to a park and letting it out there. This is a difficult issue :(

I think breeding season is 12 months of the year for them......

Very interesting - luckily I've not got anywhere near as many rats on my allotment - maybe my veg doesn't taste as good as yours! I noticed you handle stuff which has obviously had contact with rats - are you not worried about Weil's disease?