Of Mice and Mint (and Mothballs)
Q. James in Oklahoma City titles his email “Mint vs Mighty Mouse and his friends and family”, and writes: “Is there any scientific basis to show that planting mint around your house will repel mice and other rodents?!”
A. The short answer is ‘no’. The long answer is that it appears that mint used in a different way really will keep mice from eating your unprotected edibles. Or building bedrooms in infrequently used kitchen drawers.
As far as I can research, there is absolutely no proof that any plant will keep insects and/or vermin out of a desired area when they’re just sitting there in the ground or a pot. Yes, if you plant nothing but strongly scented mints in your garden, there probably wouldn’t be any mice in there.
But that’s very different than protecting a house. To do that, you would have to essentially dig a raised bed around the entire place and plant it with mint, which sounds like too much trouble to protect your supply of Triskets. And within a few years your entire neighborhood would be overwhelmed with mint and then the mice would no longer be your primary problem.
Note: any plant in the mint family (which includes plants without mint in their name like lemon balm) is difficult to impossible to control once planted. Mints are wonderful plants, but they are aggressive, invasive and harder to kill than Mickey’s broomstick in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
Back to mice, neither Mighty nor Mickey. I didn’t want to rely on my ‘old knowledge’ here so I did a fair amount of new research and found an excellent You Tube site called “Mouse Trap Monday” wherein a guy named Shawn Woods is testing everything that people say will repel mice, describing his research projects in depth along the way. These aren’t just You Tube videos. These are Citizen Science at its highest level, and they’re also fun to watch.
One of the touches that impressed me the most were the things he tested that didn’t work: Irish Spring (the mice actually ate the horrifically scented soap), the dreaded Carolina Reaper pepper (the mice enjoyed eating that as well), dryer sheets, predator urines; all were a bust. (And the method of obtaining that urine is shockingly cruel.)
So you can’t fault Shawn for being doubtful about peppermint oil. But after seeing his excellent science I bought a commercial product from Victor (the world’s leading producer of mouse and rat traps): chiclet-shaped little squares filled with essential oil of peppermint. They worked.
For his experiments, Shawn used a specially constructed drawer placed out in a barn. And, like all good scientists, he had two drawers; one containing the supposedly active substance being tested and one that was baited without the supposed repellant. Both drawers had one tiny entrance hole that would allow mice to enter and leave, and both (as per previous experiments) were baited with sunflower seeds, a favorite food of miserable meeses.
The package he purchased had two mint-releasing egg-shaped capsules, which he hung at opposite ends at the test drawer, poured some seeds into the drawer and shut it normally. (I’ll let you know why that’s important in a minute.) In what I’ll call ‘the control drawer’, he just put the seeds and then slid that drawer into place. And both brilliantly and seriously creepy, he had night vision cameras set up to capture the action.
The footage shows mice coming into the drawer with the mint-releasing devices and exiting faster than a vampire in a crucifix factory, while every seed in the untreated drawer was dined upon with fervor. I am therefore convinced that essential oil of mint, placed in the drawers and pantries in which you would normally find evidence of mouse invasion, is a great idea.
And yes, you can grow peppermint yourself and use the leaves (crushed up to release the scent). Just be sure to try and contain the spread of the actual plants and replace the repellant every 30 days or so.
More importantly to me, Shawn also provided concrete evidence of the IN-effectiveness of a popular but highly dangerous ‘home remedy’: Mothballs. Thankfully, he spends the first minute of this video explaining the serious toxicity of these little cancer grenades and warns that it is a violation of Federal Law to use mothballs against mice. And he proved that they do not work. For which I sincerely thank him!
That experiment: Same two drawers. He first put one mothball into the corner of the ‘true’ drawer. (Wear gloves next time Shawn—and have your kidney checked soon!) The mice enter and gorge themselves on the seeds. He tries again, this time using the whole package of mothballs; and he cheats in favor of the mothballs by putting a hard plastic cover on top to concentrate the fumes. You and I would run out of this deathtrap immediately, but the mice are undeterred, eating every seed.
This reinforces what I have been saying about mothballs for untold decades: Do not use them; they are more toxic to you than your intended target. And now we know that they don’t work.
Thank you, Shawn; I’m now a fan of Mousetrap Monday.
Note: The original version of this story appeared some seven years ago, so products and such may have changed; but the truth remains the same, especially the plea: “Don’t buy mothballs—even if the problem is moths!”
I know you’re asking: the correct response is widely-available pheromone traps. You’re welcome.
A. The short answer is ‘no’. The long answer is that it appears that mint used in a different way really will keep mice from eating your unprotected edibles. Or building bedrooms in infrequently used kitchen drawers.
As far as I can research, there is absolutely no proof that any plant will keep insects and/or vermin out of a desired area when they’re just sitting there in the ground or a pot. Yes, if you plant nothing but strongly scented mints in your garden, there probably wouldn’t be any mice in there.
But that’s very different than protecting a house. To do that, you would have to essentially dig a raised bed around the entire place and plant it with mint, which sounds like too much trouble to protect your supply of Triskets. And within a few years your entire neighborhood would be overwhelmed with mint and then the mice would no longer be your primary problem.
Note: any plant in the mint family (which includes plants without mint in their name like lemon balm) is difficult to impossible to control once planted. Mints are wonderful plants, but they are aggressive, invasive and harder to kill than Mickey’s broomstick in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
Back to mice, neither Mighty nor Mickey. I didn’t want to rely on my ‘old knowledge’ here so I did a fair amount of new research and found an excellent You Tube site called “Mouse Trap Monday” wherein a guy named Shawn Woods is testing everything that people say will repel mice, describing his research projects in depth along the way. These aren’t just You Tube videos. These are Citizen Science at its highest level, and they’re also fun to watch.
One of the touches that impressed me the most were the things he tested that didn’t work: Irish Spring (the mice actually ate the horrifically scented soap), the dreaded Carolina Reaper pepper (the mice enjoyed eating that as well), dryer sheets, predator urines; all were a bust. (And the method of obtaining that urine is shockingly cruel.)
So you can’t fault Shawn for being doubtful about peppermint oil. But after seeing his excellent science I bought a commercial product from Victor (the world’s leading producer of mouse and rat traps): chiclet-shaped little squares filled with essential oil of peppermint. They worked.
For his experiments, Shawn used a specially constructed drawer placed out in a barn. And, like all good scientists, he had two drawers; one containing the supposedly active substance being tested and one that was baited without the supposed repellant. Both drawers had one tiny entrance hole that would allow mice to enter and leave, and both (as per previous experiments) were baited with sunflower seeds, a favorite food of miserable meeses.
The package he purchased had two mint-releasing egg-shaped capsules, which he hung at opposite ends at the test drawer, poured some seeds into the drawer and shut it normally. (I’ll let you know why that’s important in a minute.) In what I’ll call ‘the control drawer’, he just put the seeds and then slid that drawer into place. And both brilliantly and seriously creepy, he had night vision cameras set up to capture the action.
The footage shows mice coming into the drawer with the mint-releasing devices and exiting faster than a vampire in a crucifix factory, while every seed in the untreated drawer was dined upon with fervor. I am therefore convinced that essential oil of mint, placed in the drawers and pantries in which you would normally find evidence of mouse invasion, is a great idea.
And yes, you can grow peppermint yourself and use the leaves (crushed up to release the scent). Just be sure to try and contain the spread of the actual plants and replace the repellant every 30 days or so.
More importantly to me, Shawn also provided concrete evidence of the IN-effectiveness of a popular but highly dangerous ‘home remedy’: Mothballs. Thankfully, he spends the first minute of this video explaining the serious toxicity of these little cancer grenades and warns that it is a violation of Federal Law to use mothballs against mice. And he proved that they do not work. For which I sincerely thank him!
That experiment: Same two drawers. He first put one mothball into the corner of the ‘true’ drawer. (Wear gloves next time Shawn—and have your kidney checked soon!) The mice enter and gorge themselves on the seeds. He tries again, this time using the whole package of mothballs; and he cheats in favor of the mothballs by putting a hard plastic cover on top to concentrate the fumes. You and I would run out of this deathtrap immediately, but the mice are undeterred, eating every seed.
This reinforces what I have been saying about mothballs for untold decades: Do not use them; they are more toxic to you than your intended target. And now we know that they don’t work.
Thank you, Shawn; I’m now a fan of Mousetrap Monday.
Note: The original version of this story appeared some seven years ago, so products and such may have changed; but the truth remains the same, especially the plea: “Don’t buy mothballs—even if the problem is moths!”
I know you’re asking: the correct response is widely-available pheromone traps. You’re welcome.
