How to Keep Animals Away From Tulips

Hi, this is Yolanda Vanveen on behalf of Expert Village. Tulips are a beautiful plant in your garden. I love them, but unfortunately so do the deer, the mice, the rabbits and every other animal that comes through your yard. They know they're a beautiful plants. Tulip bulbs and flowers are highly edible and nutritious. Animals know that. And there's a few simple things that you can do to save them in your yard. A very easy trick that I've found is actually planting your tulips in the middle of a bunch of daffodils. Daffodils are very fragrant and deer, mice, raccoons, everyone else, they don't like the smell of daffodils. Its not edible, its poisonous and they know that. So I've been pretty successful with planting some tulips in the middle and putting daffodils all the way around the edge and that way a lot of times the deer will not go passed the daffodils to get to the tulip. Another trick I've found is putting cayenne pepper right on the bulb and right above the beds and in the wintertime you have to add cayenne pepper regularly 'cause its raining but in the summer, a lot of times you can get by with months without even bothering them and a lot of times the deer and the rabbits will remember. You can put cayenne pepper over a whole bed and all the sudden they will smell it and they'll remember it and they'll tell all the neighbors not to mess with it. Another trick is to take seashells and crumple 'em up 'cause they're kind of sharp. So if you put those all over the bulbs, on top of the beds, a lot of times when the animals go to walk across it its a little bit sharp and they'll stop right there. There's netting that you can put up. Its very kind of invisible netting so that the deer they can see the flowers but its really really thin netting and they'll get to it and they can't actually touch it. So there's a lot of different things you can do to stop the deer and the raccoons and the rabbits from getting your tulips. Lets talk about how to use tulips as a cut flower.