Keep Raccoons Out Of Your Garden With This Must-Try Cotton Ball Trick

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Raccoons may appear as cute and cuddly, but they can wreak havoc on gardens and lawns. Most often, it is their drive to find food that leads them onto your property. Once there, they may dig up your yard looking for grubs, eat garden vegetables, and dig through your trash can. They can even find ways to break into your house and leave a trail of destruction there as well. Typically, raccoons use smell to areas they believe an easy meal can be had. If you wish to keep raccoons out of your garden, turn the tables and use their strong sense of smell to deter them.

While there are a number of ways people attempt to keep raccoons out of gardens, these wild animals are way smarter than you think. As a result, they often foil even the best-laid plans. However, the one thing they always fall back on is their sense of smell, and this fact can be used to prevent them from coming into your garden. One way to do this is to remove things that attract raccoons to your yard. After a while, these masked bandits will decide your yard or garden isn't worth their time and move on. Another tactic is to put out scents they despise. A simple way to do this is employing cotton balls to hold the scent in place. Basically, you're soaking cotton balls in essential oils that raccoons hate the smell of. This is not only an effective what to keep raccoons out of your garden, but humane as well. 

As much as raccoons love the scent of trash, meat, fish, veggies, and fruit, there are plenty of other smells they despise. Among the scents that repulse raccoons are ammonia, peppermint oil, chili pepper, and vinegar. Part of the reasons raccoons despise these scents is because their sense of smell is so sensitive and irritated by these substances. These scents are also powerful enough to mask or cover many of the smells that do attract raccoons.

The key to effectively using these scents as a raccoon repellent is keeping them in place. That is where the cotton balls come in. Scent-saturated cotton balls can be placed around the perimeter of your garden and on game trails, and will continue to emit the scent over time. This hack can be used to keep a variety of critters out of your yard and garden, not just raccoons.

All you have to do is soak the cotton balls in something like Majestic Pure peppermint essential oil, ammonia, or vinegar, then set them in place. Put them close enough together to make a continual scent barrier. Replace them with freshly soaked cotton balls every couple weeks or when you can no longer smell the scent yourself. With luck, your furry visitors will move on to greener (and less stinky-to-them) pastures fairly quickly.