Kitchen Chick

The War Against Mice: Update

We've had some great success against our mouse problem recently, and I wanted to share what has worked for us.

I started with peppermint oil, which did drive the mice away, but we also noticed that peppermint oil has to be refreshed frequently otherwise they quickly return.  Sometimes they even steal the once-peppermint scented cotten balls for nesting material.  I've since added Bounce sheets and kill traps. 

I don't like killing mice, but it is, bottom line, the best way to reduce the population.  In just five days we've caught two mice and one mole between two traps.  That doesn't seem like a lot of mice, but I suspect these were the main foragers for the colony.  The mole mystifies us. We do have a mole problem in the yard, but we didn't expect to see one in the house.  It actually survived, managing only to get a leg caught.  Joe let it go near the well house.

The Bounce sheets work wonderfully at keeping the mice away.  The box I bought was particularly "stinky" (i.e. extra fragrant -- why would anyone use this stuff on their clothes?), and I only noticed at home that it was ranked "4 out of 5" levels of fragrance.  (You mean there's a Bounce sheet that is one level stinkier?  Dear god.)  Perfect for mice.  Now my kitchen smells like Bounce. 

I put Bounce sheets in non-food related areas -- the drawers with my candles (which the mice had been chewing), under the sink where they pass through on their way to other areas, the drawer with various kitchen appliance manuals and warranties, etc.  I didn't want to use the artificially scented  sheets near anything used for food, so I spritz with diluted peppermint oil where I have pots and pans, utensils, and food prep surfaces.

I've noticed a significant reduction in mouse droppings and other mouse evidence in all areas where they've been a problem in the past.  I haven't found any mouse droppings at all in drawers that contain Bounce sheets or refreshed peppermint oil.  Unprotected areas are places where we've put a trap -- we're trying to draw them out and attrack them to the food bait in the kill traps -- yet even these areas are showing only a stray mouse dropping or two.  Wherever the mice are these days, it's not the kitchen.

Here's.... Mike!

Mike Monahan, of Monahan's Fish Market, posing with a few of his friends.  We went there for brunch this morning (Spanish mackerel with Swedish-inspired mustard and dill sauce, which was wonderful but the pictures didn't turn out).

One of his friends: a stunningly large shrimp cooked head-on with Thai sauce, ginger, garlic, and green onions. Australians apparently crack the head off and suck out the contents; Joe wimped out on that part (not enough Foster's?) but says the rest was great. (Me, I don't care for large shrimp -- give me Mike's tiny, sweet Maine shrimp any time.)

Of Mice and Olive Oil

I didn't pick up here after a nearly two month hiatus just so I could talk about mice, but this one I couldn't resist.  I was making hoisin pork tonight, and I opened my "oil cabinet" to get the sesame oil and noticed something strange on the top of my gallon jug of olive oil.  Small white bits that looked sort of like wax.  A closer inspection revealed that the plastic spout had been chewed away.

I know mice will eat a lot of strange things.  I've had to put my emergency candles in plastic bags because they were eating the wax.  But I would like to think that if the mice are desparate enough to chew on the olive oil spout that my recent attempts to deprive them of food sources is beginning to work.

All the same, it's annoying (and not cheap) to lose a gallon of olive oil, even if it is my "cooking olive oil".  Fortunately my expensive olive oils are in glass bottles and will be unaffected by mice.

If the above isn't a good enough shot, here's a close-up of the spout...

 

The War Against Mice

Long time no blog.  Not that I haven't been busy.  I could talk about the fab apple salad I had at a Thai place.  (I'll post the recipe some day.)  Or the night when I wanted to make masaman curry and I discovered that I had every Thai curry paste you can buy in the U.S. except masaman curry.  (So I made panang curry instead.)  See, for the last several months I'd go into an Asian grocery store thinking "I'm out of curry paste" and I'd agonize over which curry I was out of (because I never wrote it down) and finally grab a tub of some curry, but it was never THE curry that I was actually out of.  So I have multiple tubs of every other kind of Thai curry paste yet no masaman.  But really, I want to talk about mice.

You see, that's my New Year's resolution:  find a solution to the mouse problem. 

I have mice.  Too many mice.  I know it's futile to try to get rid of all mice in a 150+ year old house, but if I could only keep them away from the kitchen.  Away from the stove.  Away from my drawers of kitchen utensils.  I've tried traps.  I don't think it's possible to buy enough traps to get all my mice, and my local store has been out of traps for weeks and weeks.  (I suspect a major mouse invasion is going on across Southeast Michigan.)   I've tried those silly things you plug in the walls that emit high-pitched noises that are supposed to drive mice crazy.  They work for only a very short time, then the mice acclimatize to the sound.   I had a major breakthrough when I moved the cat food out of the kitchen and into the middle of the dining room.  The mice now have to cross a much larger open area to get to the cat food, which puts them at a much higher risk of getting caught by my cats.  My seventeen year old cats.  Okay, they are a spry seventeen, but they are still seventeen and I suspect their yearly take in mice is not what it was a few years ago.

Let me step backwards in time a bit.  We've always had mice, but they had only been noticeable when their carcases turned up.  (Thanks to the cats.)  But in the last year they became much more problematic, finding ways into drawers and the stove.  Yuck.  Then one day I was cleaning out a large cupboard.  I had a box with a lot of old, delicate glassware in it.  I opened the box and discovered that the box was full of cat food.  The d*mn mice were hoarding the cat food.  They filled the box and all the glassware with catfood.  I wish I had taken a picture, because at the time, while I was exploding in anger at this discovery, another part of me was laughing.  I had to wash all that glassware.  Some very beautiful delicate old juice glasses, trendy bar glasses from the 50s or 60s, and other weird stuff.  And of course I broke a glass. 

So I moved the cat food away from its kitchen nook that gave the mice such easy access to walls and cupboards for cover.  Genius.  Sheer genius.  Until Joe suggested that wouldn't it be funny to sit down someday at the piano, tap a few keys, and hear "crunch crunch".  So I peered behind the piano, and sure enough there was a brand new cat food stash.  I cleaned that out and moved the cat food yet farther away from anything.  I have yet to find any more cat food stashes.  (And, no, I'm not switching 17 year old cats used to having 24/7 access to food to set feeding times.)

While I seem to have made the cat food more inaccessible to the mice, which I hope is putting some serious population pressure on them, I haven't yet thwarted them from exploring the kitchen stove and drawers.  My current strategy is peppermint oil.  (Not extract, but full strength oil.)  Mice are supposed to be allergic to peppermint oil.  I have cotton balls with drops of peppermint oil on them in my drawers and other places where the mice frequent.  It seems to work -- mostly.  I have to remember to refresh the cotton balls so the smell stays strong.  Some days the kitchen smells all "fresh and tingly".  I'm going to make my own peppermint scented cleaning liquid that I'll use to wipe down the counters.  I think I'm on to something here.  I only hope that the mice can't acclimatize to peppermint oil.