TOPIC: Mice

I been growing ginseng for thirty years now Got all pest under control but mice.I lose thousands of dollars worth of seed a year mice traps work with peanut butter but when berry start to mature mice like them more then my bait I put up 9 screech owl boxes today might work but I also might try raising ferrel cats to do the job.Cant use poison bait for this is organic wild simulated Guys could you give me some ideas thanks Randally

I'm very interested in the owl boxes. Could you elaborate on that some please??

Randall,
I don't know how much acreage you have or if your just talking about beds, but TNhunter posted a link to a video about different varieties of ginseng. In the video, the fellow shows how he protects his individual plants when the berry pods start to mature. He uses a small drawstring bag that he pulls over the seed pod. I realize this would be pretty labor intensive with thousands of plants. A couple of us on the board are also using netting around the plant to protect them. Again, this would be a lot of work on thousands of plants. Maybe some of these thoughts, along with sticky tape, bait, traps, or whatever else that others might have used successfully will give you a little bit of an edge next year
Good luck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUKRaQMUMT0&list=UUA-ZP07pEpCzWuGGeI1veWQ

There are some bags offered on Ebay and other sites that you can Google up.

I have so many hawks and owls in my area that the mouse population is pretty low in my area, so I don't have a lot of direct experience with this.

Probably the berries keep better in the winter so the mice collect them to store them and eat them throughout the winter. So maybe you should find something that keeps better and provides more nutrition for the mice, poisoned of course. Maybe something like whole peanuts. Sunflower seeds maybe.

I grew up on a farm so I do have experience with one rat/mouse solution, you could always get a cat (or several depending on how many plants you're trying to protect) and just feed it lean when the ginseng berries start to ripen. You'd want to get barn cat type cats not house cats obviously. Make sure to spay them if you get any females, or you'll have more cats than you know what to do with in a couple years. It took 20 years after my father's farm shut down to get the cat population under control.

An experienced grower told me that he was having a problem with chipmunks eating the seeds that he was planting out, so to divert their attention from the ginseng seed he scattered corn through the planting areas. Soon enough the chipmunks they were catching had cheeks full of corn instead of ginseng seed. Not sure how attracted mice are to corn, but from my experience just about every animal loves it. My concern is that corn could draw in turkeys. This could be an organic method of preventing seed damage, but it doesn't get rid of them.

Tanner

I have seen this one before. Looks like it works pretty good.
Latt

Welcome to this forum, RandallY.

Latt, thanks for posating the vid.. it's so simple that it's brilliant! Gonna try this in my greenhouse.

Lol, I did that to a poor squirrel accidentally. I left a five gallon bucket in my yard for watering some trees and shrubs I planted. Then one day I go out there and it had about 10 inches of water in it with a squirrel floating in it. Oops, I don't know how he got in there, but I found him at least a day too late.

Hi Brad I meet you at the 2014 ginseng summit in Rutland Ohio. I wont know if owl boxes will work until next berry season The male owls will show there lady the new houses and its up to her if she wants to move in around January or February I will let you know if it helps still would like to have some more ideas will The mice are still there lots of tracks in snow now they will start eating some of my roots for winter food

RandallY wrote:

Hi Brad I meet you at the 2014 ginseng summit in Rutland Ohio. I wont know if owl boxes will work until next berry season The male owls will show there lady the new houses and its up to her if she wants to move in around January or February I will let you know if it helps still would like to have some more ideas will The mice are still there lots of tracks in snow now they will start eating some of my roots for winter food

Oh, ok.

That makes sense. But do they require semi-specific measurements like some birds do?