Not a single dacha is immune from the appearance of unwanted guests: mice come to human homes in late autumn in the hope of easy prey and, thanks to their omnivorous nature, feel quite at ease.
The harm they cause is colossal - in addition to spoiling food, winter supplies and an unpleasant odor, they carry with them diseases that are dangerous to humans. Therefore, the fight against them must begin immediately at the first signs of their visits, and in order to protect the cottage from mice in winter, preventive measures should be taken in the fall.
If there have been no people in the house for a long time, then the specific “mouse” smell is immediately felt. It's even worse if you can see mouse excrement on tables, cabinets and floors. And if there are traces of mouse teeth left on the food supplies, there is no doubt that the rodents will thoroughly and permanently settle in the house.
Given their appetite, indiscriminate eating habits and fertility, you can find their nests absolutely everywhere. They especially like fabric, from which they can build a cozy place for breeding. They do not disdain wood, paper, polyethylene and even insulation. What remedy should you choose for mice in your dacha in winter in order to get rid of their visits for a long time?
The fight against rodents must be carried out in two directions:
The arsenal of available means of combat can be divided into the following categories:
When choosing a way to deal with mice in the countryside in winter, everyone is guided by their own specific circumstances.
For many centuries, mice have been trying to settle next to humans, and he is finding new ways to get rid of them. There are a lot of tips, some surprise you with their ingenuity, but you can only recommend time-tested ones.
There are quite effective physical ways to get rid of mice in the countryside in winter, but they all involve the need to remove the caught mouse from a trap or mousetrap and somehow get rid of it.
A simple mousetrap works half the time
If there are a lot of mice, then a considerable number of mousetraps will be required, and this method is not always effective: a rodent can eat the bait and deftly dodge the triggered mousetrap. Domestic cats live in the country with their owners only until winter, and not every cat “mouses”; some are more afraid of mice than their owners.
Electronic traps, which are triggered by movement and can kill the rodent with an electric shock, have become a technologically advanced and effective means of catching mice.
There is also a special glue, but store-bought traps with glue do not do the job very well; It’s better to buy glue in tubes and make your own traps: a continuous line of glue is applied around the perimeter in a thick layer on sheets of cardboard, and bait is placed in the middle. Instead of cardboard, you can take disposable plastic plates and prepare a “treat” on them.
Glue trap is an effective way to catch mice
It is advisable to apply the glue, leaving free space around the edges: when the mouse sticks, and it sticks tightly, “bear disease” happens to it, and cleaning up excrement from the floor is no pleasure. Moreover, the adhesive layer retains its effect for the next year. While no one lives at the dacha, you can place such traps everywhere. The mouse that comes across is thrown out along with the cardboard without killing it in the house.
Chemical preparations guarantee a reliable and quick effect in the fight against rodents. Toxic substances are placed in the bait, sprayed or applied in places where mice are likely to appear. Drugs such as “Zookoumarin”, “Nutcracker” and others cause suffocation and death; Moreover, the mice, having eaten the bait, strive to get out into the fresh air.
Other drugs cause mass mortality within rodent populations. You won’t need much of this poison for mice at the dacha for the winter, but it’s worth remembering that rodents can die in hard-to-reach places and this can only be understood by the unpleasant smell: you’ll have to look for a hole and somehow get rid of the mouse remains.
Chemicals are an effective remedy, but they cannot be used when there are children or pets at the dacha.
There is another effective way to protect your cottage from mice in winter. We are talking about ultrasonic repellers. A person does not perceive its waves, but mice hear a terrible roar from which there is nowhere to hide.
"Tornado" 800 is an ultrasonic device designed to combat rodents - rats, mice
If you buy a device that does not run on electricity, but on batteries, you can leave it in an empty house - then the mice will stay as far as possible from your dacha. So, there are many ways to fight, it is up to the owner of the dacha to decide which one to choose: humane or not.
If you have not encountered a mouse invasion at your dacha, it means that conditions have naturally developed in your garden house or on your property that prevent the normal existence of mice, despite the availability of food and water. Such miracles happen quite rarely in a summer cottage, and in most cases it takes a lot of effort to keep the dangerous rodent at bay.
For each specific dacha, as a rule, there is its own most effective way to deal with mice. There is no desire or time to spend energy on a long search for a “miraculous” potion, therefore, in order to effectively and quickly get rid of mice forever, you will need a comprehensive method of control, usually consisting of proven means:
Important! The most difficult period in the fight against mice, depending on the climate zone in which the dacha is located, is the moment the air temperature drops to 5-7oC, when the mouse is actively preparing for the winter at your dacha.
In addition to voles, domestic gray mice can also “register” at the dacha. They do not go into the field and live in the dacha building as long as there is a person there and food supplies are available. They can occupy all buildings in the country, the subfloor, basement, barn, and even areas next to the compost heap.
The field mouse comes and settles in the country only during the cold season. In summer, field mice live next to the most accessible crops for food - grains and sunflowers. Therefore, if during the warm season, in early spring, mice appeared at the dacha, most likely it was a house mouse, and it got into the room, perhaps with your help.
Before hordes of field mice appear, it is urgent to take preventive measures and get rid of several individuals before offspring appear. It is best to get rid of it using chemical poisons and mechanical traps with different baits. For one room or room in the country where food and dishes are stored, you need at least three or four mousetraps, one installed next to the place where the dishes are stored, one in the area of boxes with food supplies and one or two on the floor.
In early spring, it is almost impossible to get rid of mice at your dacha using repellents. There is still no vegetation or fruits that mice could feed on outside the dacha, so no matter how much you scare them away, they will not leave. Therefore, during this period, it will be possible to get rid of the mouse with the help of mousetraps, cats and poisons placed in places inaccessible to the cat’s teeth.
Carrying out preventive measures has always been and remains the most boring and time-consuming part of the fight. From practical observations it is known that without prevention it is impossible to get rid of mice in the countryside.
First of all, you need to perform simple but very effective measures:
Advice! Do not use poisons, even the most harmless ones to humans. Sooner or later they will end up on your table and often become the causes of serious problems and chronic diseases, which will be very difficult to get rid of.
The mouse is able to develop relative immunity, and thanks to its good memory, it can completely ignore poison bait. In the worst case, a mouse that has died in the underground or behind the wall cladding can poison the entire dacha. To get rid of the problem, you will need to dismantle the structure of the cottage and spend tens of liters of chlorine preparations to destroy the infection and get rid of the smell.
The best way to fight mice in “distant cordons” and to get rid of mouse infestation inside the house is considered to be the mouse’s natural enemies – the hedgehog and the cat. But not a domestic purr, but a hungry half-wild cat, or better yet, a cat that comes to the dachas with the warming weather in search of food. If the animal is regularly fed near the house, it will help to effectively get rid of rodents near the dacha premises before the end of the work season.
An ordinary adult hedgehog is considered no less dexterous in fighting mice. Unlike a cat, a hedgehog will help get rid of mice in the garden beds and thickets. For registration, hedgehogs choose a place under the stairs, and if you are friends with the animal, they can live for years in one area.
In addition, be sure to install closed mouse traps inside the cottage, in front of the threshold at the entrance to the house. In the summer, the mouse population grows, and there is no guarantee that a couple of rodents will not drop into the house. A closed trap will help you get rid of the risk; it is the most effective and safest type of mousetrap. In essence, this is an ordinary mousetrap, but placed in a steel mesh box. In some cases, trap bodies can be made of sheet steel with holes 10 mm in diameter.
Thanks to the use of metal, the trap has good strength and is easy to disinfect and clean. The most important thing is that they are completely safe for any representatives of the animal world, except mice. A caught mouse will not drag it away, and if caught, it will not be eaten by a house cat. This way you can protect your pet from the risk of getting one of the many infections that mice carry.
To protect a cottage or outbuildings, it is enough to install several traps at the entrance to the premises. With the onset of cold weather, when voles are actively searching for wintering sites, traps will have to be checked twice a day or more often.
The fight against mouse infestations is effective until the end of September. Then the activity of the animals sharply decreases, and there is no hope that they will be able to save you and your dacha from mouse attacks.
If you haven't sealed all the cracks with fiberglass cement mortar at the time of harvesting and preparing your garden plot, now is the time to do so. If in early spring the blocking of mouse paths within the walls of the house was carried out on a whim, now it is possible to determine exactly where and how mice get into the dacha premises.
The ability of mice to chew through structures, and even concrete, has been greatly exaggerated. To make a hole in concrete coating 5mm thick, a mouse will need at least 30-35 days. Sealing cracks using a cement composition with glass wool guarantees the integrity of the basement and foundation parts of the dacha. Fiberglass, even in the smallest portions, severely injures the rodent. Often, the floor and walls in areas where mice move are simply lined with glass wool and covered with a screen made of tin or galvanized steel. This method is cheaper than chemicals and helps get rid of mice for decades.
Important! The use of glass wool requires special precautions; the smallest sharp fibers can penetrate the skin and cause acute inflammatory processes.
It will be impossible to get rid of mice as long as crops and food are stored open in the dacha premises. By eliminating the smell of food, you will stop mice from trying to get into your home. Everything collected on the site must be stored in steel barrels with lids or transported for storage to another location.
The most savage attempt to get rid of mice is the use of gas agents. In such cases, they try to seal the house in the country and blow it out with some kind of disinfectant gas based on dichlorvos, chlorine, or even car exhaust gases. Do not try to get rid of mice in this way; this ineffective measure can lead to poisoning or fire. Leave such remedies for the professionals.
A small pest, capable of digging a huge network of invisible underground tunnels and thereby causing incredible damage to plants, can settle in any area. If you notice that your plantings are dying without visible signs of disturbance, most likely a vole mouse has been at work here. There are several ways to get rid of this small rodent.
One of the main methods of controlling vole mice is regular plowing of the site in spring and autumn. Loosen the soil to a depth of 30 cm. This will significantly worsen the living and breeding conditions for rodents, and you will be able to reduce the population size and prevent their appearance. On the site, use a mixed planting of main crops with those that the vole mouse cannot tolerate because of their specific pungent odor. These are garlic, wormwood, mint, imperial hazel grouse, black currant.
Remember that by destroying rodents without acting humanely, we are violating an ecological niche, so try to choose control methods such that voles will look for another place to live on their own.
Surely everyone knows these small harmful rodents, whose teeth affect not only the building structures of country houses, but also plantings in the garden and vegetable garden. That is why the fight against mice is one of the most important activities carried out by the owner of a personal plot to preserve the harvest of vegetables and fruits. Small rodents that have settled in the garden are quite capable of causing the death of young berry bushes or young flower bushes in the rose garden, turning all covering material into dust and undermining the legs of garden furniture, “tasting” the vegetables stored in the vegetable storehouse and destroying garden crops made the day before. The only solution to these problems is to fight mice using all available methods. However, in order to defeat the enemy you need to know him in person. Let's figure out who is harming our site.
All animals belong to the mouse family from the order of rodents of the mammalian class; they can give 5-6 litters per season, 4-10 cubs in each litter. It is not difficult to calculate the progression in which the number of mice on the site will increase if no measures are taken to combat them.
The most common type of mouse living near humans is the house mouse. It is this that is the source of most of the damage received by ripe vegetables, seeds or garden equipment. The animal has a gray or gray-brown color and a very characteristic “mouse” smell.
The field mouse or vole is distinguished from its fellows by a black stripe running across its back. This rodent is very fond of young shoots, seeds and flower bulbs.
The wood mouse is less common, but, nevertheless, it also damages the garden plot, gnawing succulent seedlings of fruit trees and eating berries on bushes.
Throughout the entire period of the fight against mice, humans have come up with many different methods to rid the house, outbuildings and the entire area of these rodents. Among them there are traditional ones, such as, for example, the use of pesticides, and folk ones, using traps of various designs. We cannot discount the latest scientific developments in the form of various ultrasonic repellers (although many gardeners have an ambiguous attitude towards them).
This method works well in preventing the appearance of rodents on the site and consists of planting plants that in one way or another repel the animals. For example, plantings of imperial hazel grouse will be protected by rose seedlings and young shoots of fruit trees, and a bed of carrots planted with garlic will probably remain untouched. If you put bird cherry and elderberry branches in the basement where vegetables are stored, you can protect the harvest from uninvited guests. Several blackroot bushes planted in plantings of hydrangea, peonies and phlox will not allow sharp teeth to be imprinted on the stems of the latter. But it is worth adding celandine and tansy to the covering material that protects plants from frost. These are, so to speak, herbal methods of fighting mice, or rather preventing them.
The natural enemy of all small rodents is the cat. Its presence sometimes also scares away mice, but not every pet wants to hunt them. Therefore, it is quite difficult to call such a method effective. And you certainly shouldn’t rely on him alone in the fight against mice.
Almost 100% results are achieved by using special toxic substances based on phosphates. One package of “Rat Death” is guaranteed to rid any building of the entire mouse family. The pesticide “Storm” has almost the same effect. However, this method must be used quite carefully and is even completely unacceptable if there are small children in the house. The use of such poisons on the street is fraught with the destruction of beneficial animals and birds, even if such bait is covered with something on top. After all, a poisoned mouse will crawl out and there it will be caught by a cat or the same domestic chicken.
Traditional bait recipes are less toxic, but may not work immediately. For example, the following mixture is very common:
Take flour, alabaster (gypsum) and sugar in equal quantities, move everything carefully and place it near the mouse hole. Water in the visible area must be removed. Having “tasted” such a treat, the rodent dies.
Or here's the exact opposite method:
Mix and grind sugar and quicklime, place it near the entrance to the hole, and place a saucer of water next to it. In this case, it is the chemical reaction that will carry out the “sentence”.
However, mice quickly get used to such “surprises” and subsequently, having lost a certain number of their relatives, bypass the offered treats.
An ideal option for those who are “raiding” at the dacha and who have no time to search for the best method in the fight against mice, repellers that work on the basis of ultrasound are best suited. These devices emit ultrasonic waves that are inaudible to humans, but very sensitive to rodents. It is the intolerance of such influence on the latter that forces them to scatter away from the source. However, to choose the best device option, you need to carefully re-read the labels and manufacturers’ recommendations.
The designs of traps made by folk craftsmen can boast of very good results. They can be divided into two directions: a trap with a catcher and a trap with a spring mechanism. The first allows the mouse to stay alive, and the second destroys the rodent.
There are quite a few methods of fighting mice; which one to choose depends on the specific conditions. The effectiveness of such control is largely ensured by a practical approach to obtaining a positive result, and this requires the use of a whole set of solutions to prevent the appearance and direct destruction of small rodents on the site and at home.
How to protect your cottage from mice? We will get acquainted with several methods of varying complexity - from folk methods dating back several centuries to the use of modern sound-emitting devices. So let's get started.
This cute animal is the sworn enemy of the summer resident.
What exactly do rodents interfere with?
It’s interesting: a side effect of the abundance of mice is the active proliferation of weeds.
After the destruction of part of the food plants, loosened soil remains, and a holy place, as we know, is never empty...
How to get rid of mice in the countryside using folk remedies?
The simplest and most obvious solution is to get a cat. Even city cats spoiled by comfort, once in nature, quickly remember the basics of hunting and mouse excitedly. Moreover, mice understand perfectly well that it is unsafe to be in the territory protected by a cat, and they quickly leave it.
How to get rid of mice in a dacha in winter when no one lives there?
Rodents navigate their surroundings to a large extent thanks to their extremely developed sense of smell. Moreover, some strong and pungent odors irritate mice much more than humans. The source of smell can be essential oils, colognes and... plants.
Dry herbs with pungent odors perfectly repel animals in winter; living plants can perform the same task in summer.
| View | Instructions for use |
| Ledum | Branches with leaves are laid out at the entrances to burrows or pushed directly into the burrow. Mice leave the home and do not return. |
| Elder | The plant is planted near compost heaps and storage facilities. Tree seedlings are tied with elderberry branches; as an option, they can be laid under covering material. |
| Chamomile | Flower heads scatter on the floor of the house and storage. Bunches of chamomile are placed near supplies. |
| Sagebrush | Thickets of wormwood along the perimeter of the garden can completely repel rodents from the area. Harvested wormwood is used to bind the trunks of seedlings; Since it retains the smell for a long time, you can simply lay out bunches on the site. |
| Cilantro (coriander) | Planted around fruit trees or those plantings that are often subject to rodent attacks. |
| Tomato tops | After crushing, it is laid out under young fruit trees and bushes. In the spring, after filling with soil, the tops become excellent compost. |
In the photo - common wormwood.
How to remove mice from your dacha if you don’t want to have a cat and the plants listed above don’t grow in you?
You can try to catch the rodents living in your home. Here are a couple of trap designs that you can easily make yourself.
Comment: Water is needed to prevent mice from jumping out of the bucket.
With their modest size, they are quite capable of crossing an obstacle 30-40 centimeters high, especially in a stressful situation.
The second trap is even simpler and, pleasantly, more humane.
How to get rid of bats in your dacha? One of the methods is so universal that it is equally effective on both winged predators and rodents of all types.
You see, compared to small animals, humans are catastrophically hard of hearing. This applies not only to amplitude, but also to range: we cannot hear sound with a frequency of 16-25 kHz. But they are more than that.
Actually, the universal solution is an ultrasound generator with a continuously changing frequency. How to scare away mice in the country using such a device? It is enough to simply bring out the wiring under any canopy and plug the device into an outlet; from this moment on, all small animals in the area will hear a continuously ear-piercing squeal.
