Mice: 5 Ways to Reduce the Pull Factor in Your Kitchen

Mice. They’ll eat you out of the house and home, or at least leave their little offerings (yes, of poo!) so you can’t eat your food anyway for fear of parasitic infection or worse. They are cute, but the potential damage they can cause is far from it.

So how do you make your home less attractive to smaller rodents? Prevention is key. First of all, you want to prevent mice from getting into your house. But how? The trick is knowing what’s on a mouse’s home search checklist:

• warm
• dried
• near a water source
• safe from cats, rats, weasels and ratter dogs
• lots of cracks and crevices in which to sneak, hide and travel from room to room without being seen
• and last but not least, an abundant supply of food

In fact, it is the latter that will make or break your efforts to keep the mouse population at bay in a rural home.

I think the whole time I lived in the city (20+ years), I think we had mice maybe once. Then there was the old house that had rats in the walls… but that’s another story. In general, it was not an ongoing problem. So when we moved to our little farm in the woods, I had no idea what to expect. None. So naive, so, so naive…

It started slowly. We moved in April so the weather was warming up and the mice were moving outside anyway. But the house had been empty for quite some time before we started our renovations. They then spent another 6 months of being there during the day, painting and refinishing floors. And it’s a log cabin, with lots of little cracks and ways for mice to get in. Basically, it was his home. Period.

That fall was when it hit me between the eyes: We shared our home with a mother mouse and her babies. Which sounds kind of cute until you find his poop all over your kitchen counter (gross, gross, gross!). And they nibble big holes in their expensive organic avocados, rendering them inedible for fear of a horrific rodent epidemic. The weirdest thing they ate was a jalapeño pepper. A jalapeno chili!!! I can’t even eat a whole jalapeno… Crazy.

So I quickly learned that there are a few things that will reduce the appeal of your kitchen to your little four-legged friends. Here are five to get you started:

1. check your closets (even the top ones) for any holes that might allow a mouse to get in. I’m talking about the size of a dime and sometimes less, depending on the size of the mouse. If you find a hole or crack, fill it with some steel wool or putty, or seal it with some kind of attractive trim.
2. Put all grains, flour, and other staples in glass jars or jars., hermetically sealed (yes, even if they’re in the sealed cabinets, you never know).
3. Place any food left on the counter in sealed containers and all fruit in a wire mesh container with a lid. At a minimum, wrap the fruit in thick storage bags so the odor doesn’t come off (at least not as strong). Warning: I’ve had mice chew through those bags to get to a ripe banana. Not mouse proof, but mouse resistant.
4. Make sure you wash all your dishes before you go to bed, or at least rinsed well. Any food left on the plates is gourmet to a mouse. Delicious! Also be sure to clean counters with a vinegar and water solution (1 part vinegar to 4 parts water should do the trick) or your favorite kitchen counter cleaner. Any smell of food will attract them like grilled ribs at a tailgate party.
5. Vacuuming and sweeping – a lot! If you have kids (or a messy spouse), check your seats and the floor for crumbs after meals. After they get up. Those little bits of food you see on the floor? They could feed a whole family of mice. And keep them coming back for more. Forever.

If you put these five fixes into practice, you should reduce the attractants in your home for mice, and they just might move on. Of course I’m kidding. They will never really move on. Unless you have a cat. Even then they will probably only annoy the cat. But at least they’ll eventually stop pooping on the counter.