Coffee Grounds: Natural Rodent Repellent?

You may want to live green, but how far are you willing to go when it comes to protecting the beauty of nature? Are you willing to live side-by-side with rodents, for example? Rodents have been around homes since the beginning of time with the promise of easy pickings, and cats often do the dirty work of keeping them away. But not everyone has a cat and even if you do, not every cat is cut out to be running mice and rats to the ground. So it falls on you to handle the problem, organically if possible.

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It begs the question – can you do away with or at least keep away mice and other pests without resorting to poisons? If you were to use a poison, as many do, for pest control, you’d soon have a problem of an entirely different nature. Mice are notorious for taking poison and then heading home to die. Unfortunately the mouse’s home is most likely inside the walls of your home. So suddenly you don’t have the odor of coffee to deal with emanating from the floors, you have the odor of a dead mouse behind your walls. Fantastic.

In one bit of good news, coffee does help you out a bit at this point. Sprinkling coffee grounds, or putting a small bowl of them near the wall that seems to be the source of the smell will help to diffuse the odor, a far superior idea than cutting open the wall to remove the dead pest.

Green Ideas for Pest Control

Your next choice might be to use a trap to catch the mice, just add peanut butter to lure them in and they will almost almost find a way into the trap. If you have the stomach to actually kill the mouse yourself after catching him, this might be a solution for your home, provided you don’t have children who might be harmed by the traps. For most of us, however, the idea of repelling the mice and simply keeping them away is the best plan of all.

Peppermint Oil is a good way to discourage rodents – soak cotton balls in the oil or mix with water then cover the areas you know they move across. Some also suggest growing peppermint plants in key areas for the same impact.

Cat urine may also scare them off, if you can get them to pee into the cup!

Some even try snake poo in an effort to scare off mice and rats, and if you do have access to this via a zoo or pet store then it might actually be worth a try.

Confirming here that coffee doesn’t work as a deterrent, but there are other organic compounds that do. Just like you can find traditional pest repellents for homes and yards, there are now organic varieties as well. The organic version will likely be a bit more expensive than a $1 mouse trap or a can of chemically-based pellets, but using organic rodent deterrents protects you from diseases and damage caused by pests and it protects the mouse, too, by encouraging it to find another home. An all-around best solution.

And if all else fails…. get one of these!

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Rebecca Garland is a freelance writer and blogger working hard to populate the internet with interesting and engaging content. As a mother of two with an eye on keeping things safe for her family and future generations, Rebecca tries to use as many natural products as possible including natural pest deterrents. You can learn more about Rebecca from her website.