Kitchen Garden Forum

We have a larder shelf in the garage for dry & tinned goods, soup, pasta, rice, dishwasher tablets, all the stuff where you can take advantage of decent prices only if you have storage room.

Heard scratching late at night some days ago and isolated it to the sealed pitched roof void above the back of the kitchen. No trace of a hole or creature that I could see.

Monday decided on soup for lunch and didn't like the kitchen choice so went to the garage and shuffling the tins found that the pasta bag had been got at in several places, together with scattered mouse poo, crap & dine being mouse sophistication.

Set two traps with cheese, this morning a mouse in each.


Does seem an odd time for them to be indoors to me, I though cold weather brought them in?

Did your stock come from Tesco?

Can't stand the place, I use Sainsburys.

peter wrote:Can't stand the place, I use Sainsburys.

Better class of mouse!

http://local.stv.tv/edinburgh/news/2897 ... packaging/

Come on chaps, serious question was;

"Does seem an odd time for them to be indoors to me, I though cold weather brought them in?"

I think it's food that brings them in. I suspect mice have a keen sense of smell as well as a hunger for easy pickings.

And with all this warm weather they will be breeding like fury, so any meal will be welcome, as there probably isn't that much natural food about at the moment.

Dry pasta sealed in a plastic bag/sack, smell?

The lidded plastic 25kg box of dogfood probably does smell though.

The mice have probably seen what a fine fellow the pasta has turned you into, Peter.

I guess they haven't just moved in, what is new is you have found them. There is probably an odd packet that lets some smell out or perhaps some spillage. Mind they chew up paper and plastic as nesting material so they might have found food by chance. I found a nest in the bubble wrap I put round my pressure washer for the Winter, they must have been cosy.

Had a rat once chew through a sturdy rubber pipe in the bathroom; the hard kind of rubber.. When I blocked the hole with plaster, he ate that too..

Our JRT Cross is at present on vermin duty though....

Traps unsprung since the two successes.
Here's hoping all solved.

peter wrote:Traps unsprung since the two successes.
Here's hoping all solved.

Wisest to store untinned dry goods in lidded plastic bins.

Sound advice Marigold, I might get one of those dustbin style metal bread bins for the pasta and rice.

The dog food caused problems before and is now in a stackable plastic chest/box with a chamfered front that has a trapdoor on top, chamfer angle on top and bottom allowing a stack to be made while allowing their doors to open. Had to train daughter, dog-feeder, to not spill any of the rabbit-turd food though.