Keep Groundhogs From Ruining Your Garden With 2 Kitchen Staples

Gardening can be a peaceful, meditative practice, and it can be incredibly rewarding to watch the progress of your plants and produce. However, gardening can also be a source of a great deal of grief, especially if you've got certain pests to deal with. There are lots of ways to get rid of pests in your garden, and a lot of the time you can use small and simple solutions to get rid of things like mosquitos and other small nuisances that plague your house or plants. This is fine and dandy for little bugs, but sometimes those garden-ruining critters are much larger. Groundhogs are one such example.

Groundhogs can cause no end of trouble rummaging through your garden, but thankfully there's a fairly easy way to prevent them from causing more trouble. Simply crushing up some garlic and pepper and sprinkling this combination around your garden (and in/around any holes) can deter these creatures. Not only is this effective, but it's also a natural solution — and better yet, you likely already have these two ingredients on hand.

It's often a sound idea to make use of natural solutions in your garden if they can be achieved, as opposed to using pesticides that you wouldn't want to risk consuming yourself — and this garlic and pepper combo certainly satisfies that. And the reason why they work to repel groundhogs is actually a quite simple one: groundhogs just plain find it unpleasant. Garlic can be pretty pungent even to us, so it's no surprise that a groundhog's sensitive nose would find it repulsive.

As for black pepper, this is of course also a notoriously irritating ingredient for the nose. In fact, it seems that you can even up the spice factor if you've got particularly stubborn groundhogs, as cayenne pepper can also be used to deter these rodents. All of this can provide a simple lesson that sometimes even the most basic household ingredients can be the answer to your gardening problems — take cream of tartar as another example, which is yet another common pantry ingredient that can serve as a natural pesticide and weed killer in your homesteading ventures. With these items on hand, then, you should be set for trouble-free gardening no matter what might be troubling you.