The Plastic Fork Hack That Keeps Animals Out Of Your Vegetable Garden

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While growing your own delicious vegetables in your garden can be absolutely rewarding, they do take a little work. You have to enrich the soil, keep your plants watered, and worst of all, stop all those annoying pests from destroying all your hard work. Keeping animals and other pests out of the vegetable garden has led many gardeners on a quest to find unusual methods that may or may not work. A common hack you might have come across is using plastic forks as a deterrent, but does this actually work?

The hack involves getting a heap of those plastic forks and "planting" them among your vegetables with the tines facing upwards. Although this may look a little weird, the idea is that certain animals and pests, like rabbits, squirrels, and raccoons, will find climbing over the forks quite uncomfortable and even painful, so they'll end up avoiding your garden altogether. Plastic forks are also not a natural part of the garden, which means those annoying visitors might view them as a possible predator. Essentially, the forks can create both a physical and visual barrier that wild animals may not be prepared to tackle. Even your pets may avoid your veggie beds. While using plastic forks may help to some degree, they're not going to keep your vegetable patch completely safe from all animals and pests. By the way, did you know that you can throw a common vegetable around your yard to help keep rabbits away?

Using plastic forks in your vegetable garden is a sustainable way to reuse an item that might otherwise end up in a landfill, so that's definitely a bonus. What you will find, though, is that this method will only work when your plants are just seedlings and won't be as effective once they get bigger. At the end of the day, your best defense against pests destroying your crop is to use a combination of humane ways to keep critters out of your yard.

One age-old method that gardeners have been using successfully is to embrace companion planting. This involves growing certain highly aromatic plants, like alliums, rosemary, marigolds, and nasturtiums around and in between your veggies. The strong aroma of these plants will often deter animals that find the scent unpleasant. You'll find that this might even keep deer away. Some gardeners also find that sprinkling pepper, coffee ground, and eggshells around their vegetables can deter certain pests. Finally, the most effective way to keep those pesky animals out of your vegetable patch is to use a physical barrier they can't get through, like these chicken wire crop coops from Gardener's Supply Company or even fine mesh pop-up crop covers which are portable, and can keep insect pests out as well. As an alternative, you could keep pets and pests out of your garden with a DIY bamboo fence. Using a variety of critter deterrents should help keep your vegetables safe so you can enjoy a bumper harvest.