How to Keep Raccoons Out of a Garden

Hi I'm Stan DeFreitas, Mr. Green Thumb. We're at Willow Tree Nursery in St. Petersburg, Florida. How do you keep raccoons out of your garden area? Well probably if you really want to keep them out, you're going to put some fencing, maybe some chicken wire or maybe just some traditional fencing. Remember they're pretty smart and they'll figure out ways to go around your fencing pretty easily unless you really do a good job of making it secure. Sometimes just creating something though that they have to go around and over helps a tad bit. Also doing good sanitation, getting rid of some of those half eaten tomatoes and lettuce and things that you leave in the yard and garden might be an encouragement for them. Wrapping up your garbage and getting rid of that may also be helpful. Now if you want to try one of the sprays like the capsule type spray, it's got a pepper base and it seems to help on a lot of different types of wild animals. Why? It's pepper based, hot pepper typically they don't like the hot peppers so they might go off to your neighbor's yard which is just going to be a little bit easier to make their feast. In general raccoons aren't going to be a major, major problem. You normally can go ahead and water, fertilize and if you do lose a tomato or two to the raccoon, well it's part of gardening. For ask mrgreenthumb.com, I'm Stan DeFreitas.