Drawing my eco-line at mice

Post From the Past:

Apparently mice like these

A lot! I guess the basket we kept in our pantry filled with Cliff bars was just too much for the mice to resist.

Last week my husband (luckily it was him and not my daughter or I cuz there would have been a lot of screaming and maybe even some tears) saw a mouse scurry out of our pantry, across our kitchen floor, and up under the cabinet. Ugh!

We removed everything from our pantry, cleaned the shelves, looked through all the food, discarded everything the mice had gotten into (apparently they also like wheat thins and 4 year old gingerbread houses), repacked as many items as we could into glass jars and plastic containers (that use to contain things like peanut butter & mustard but now contain things like beans & cheddar bunnies) and put everything back on the shelf.

On a positive note, my pantry shelves look great! Nice and clean and organized.

My husband then did the same in the garage.

I was hoping that by getting rid of their food source we would get rid of them. This was not the case.

So we went for the trap. (The non catch-and-release type trap)

I know what you are thinking and I will apologize now but I draw my eco-friendly line at disease infested rodents. Sorry. I just couldn't do it.

For those of you who may have a mouse problem but would prefer the catch-and-release traps I have since researched some and found this one:

Humane Mouse Trap

You use your own bottle with it (nice reuse of a bottle). I admit, I liked it cuz of the cute piece of cheese. I figured that if we/you are going to have a trap lying around it might as well be a cute one.


I also did some research on how to keep the mice from coming back (or at least try to keep them from coming back) and here is what I found out; steel wool and peppermint oil.
Apparently mice don’t like either of them (Unlike peanut butter. Which they love).
Spreading peppermint oil around areas that mice travel or leaving a cotton ball soaked in peppermint oil in places like a pantry will keep them out. Since peppermint oil smells good to me, I didn’t mind rubbing it on my pantry shelves. (Let’s hope it works). 

Plugging the holes under the cabinets with steel wool will prevent them from coming in (or out which, now that I think about it, might be a problem) because they don’t like the feel (or taste) of steel wool so they won’t chew through it.

I also found a nice blog posting about the same topic Eco-Friendly Mouse Control
 
If you have any tips you would like to share on how to keep a mouse out of a house (I love Dr. Seuss) please feel free to share.