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Protecting Bulbs from Animals
Good Practices and Barriers
Protect your outdoor bulb plantings from many animal pests that dig up and eat bulbs or otherwise destroy bulbs in beds and borders.
Common animal pests include birds, deer, gophers, mice, moles, opossums, raccoons, voles, and woodchucks—even household cats and dogs. Limit their damage by planting right.
Once mammals or birds develop a taste for bulbs, ridding your garden of them can require persistence. Most of the damage they do result from the three activities of eating, uprooting, and trampling.
Avoid luring animal pests to your garden by avoiding strong-scented fertilizers, including those made of fish emulsion and bonemeal [see Preparing Soil for Bulbs].
Instead, use unscented organic fertilizers such as composted or other well-rotted manure, organic compost, or natural mineral phosphate.
Plant bulbs that mammals and birds find distasteful. They include daffodil, hyacinth, narcissus, and ornamental onion among the spring bulbs, and anemone, begonia, calla lily, canna, dahlia, and meadow saffron in the summer bulbs.
Barriers and Fences
Block animal pests from your beds. create barriers above and below the ground. Barriers must surround the planting. To be effective, they must block both tunneling and jumping.
Mature deer regularly leap fences as tall as 8 feet (2.5 m), though two lower fences spaced about 4 feet (1.3 m) apart, especially if electrified, seem to deter them.
Gophers, moles, voles, and woodchucks dig burrows and tunnels up to 2 feet (60 cm) deep. Bury wire mesh fabric with openings of 1/2-inch (12-mm) at least that deep to prevent them from tunneling into your beds.
By far, the best barrier defense from animals is to build and bury wire mesh cages in your beds. Once they are installed, plant all your bulbs inside the cages.
Bulbs easily grow through the cage’s wires, keeping their roots protected. Dividing bulbs, however, soon will establish colonies of plants outside of the cage.
Other Prevention Methods
Less effective are decoys, noisemakers, devices that vibrate, others that move in the wind, or topical ointments made of urine from wolves and dogs. While some of these work for a time, most lose effectiveness when pests become accustomed to them.
Step-by-Step Instructions
Burrowing animals destroy bulbs by eating or dislodging them.
Protect your bulb plantings with a simple cage of wire-cloth fabric and planting your bulbs inside the cage.
Measure the area of the bed to be protected; you’ll need a bit more than twice as much 1/2-in. (12-mm) wire cloth.
gather a pair of wire cutters, a straight-edged board, a measuring tape, a shovel, and your bulbs, and follow these easy steps to build and install your cage:
Making and Installing a Bulb-Planting Cage
Unfold a cardboard box to use as a pattern for the wire-mesh cage. Create four flaps by making three parallel cuts into each side of the wire cloth fabric, 8 in. (20 cm) deep. Use a straight-edged board to crease the wire at each fold point.
After folding the flaps in and the sides up to form a cage, crease and fold the top of the cage to create a lid for the cage. Dig a hole in the bed to install the wire cage.
Fill the bottom of the box with prepared planting soil, in a layer as deep as the recommended planting depth for the bulb species. Orient and space your bulbs in the soil within the cage.
Cover the bulbs and fill the box with soil, close the lid, and fasten it to the sides with wire ties. Cover the top of the box with soil until it is level with the bed’s soil at the surface. Water the planting to settle the soil, adding fill as needed. Bulbs will sprout through the mesh cage that protects them from burrowing animals.