This is what the rats have done to my nice stone woodshed floor over the past 3 years. Needless to say my hopes for keeping them out of the back of the woodshed with hardware cloth didn’t entirely work out but believe it or not it could have been a lot worse. They mostly confined their actual damage to the second-to-last tier and even that didn’t actually ruin much wood. So it’s tolerable and I won’t go to a lot of extra hassle to change things – and I’m going to concede that there’s not much point going to the immense PITA it would be to fix the stone floor at this point. So…
Yesterday in the afternoon I brought a couple of tubs into the wash and filled them with as much sand as I could handle. Turned out to be more than I needed for the floor, and also…
…more than was wise to put in a wheelbarrow and try to take over my ditch bridge. Not only didn’t the wheelbarrow hop onto the bridge, it knocked it right off its blocks. So I ended up bringing the sand into the shed one bucket at a time, which in the end was just as well.
This is the final tier, topped off by some juniper I cut and stacked earlier this summer just because throwing it away was a sin. Believe it or not at one point I actually planned to haul all this out of here, fix the floor and then stack this wood last after woodcutting so that it got used up first – but upon reflection that came across as a stupid amount of extra work and anyway the rats haven’t been fouling it badly so why bother. To that extent, the thing with the hardware cloth seems to have worked.
I did have to haul out a small pile of accumulated wood already cut for stacking…
…and then I just carried buckets of sand and raked until it filled in the rat diggings – hopefully not currently occupied – and get it level again.
Put the wood back to start the second tier, and I was done.
A few bags of sand mix would have been helpful. Just pour it in dry and then sprinkle with water.
Yes I know, that costs money!
Would leaving the worst wood pieces out as a decoy to keep them from your wood shed work ? Whenever I eat outside, I leave a decoy crumb of bread or last of a sugary drink to attract insects over there and leave me the hell alone. It doesn’t stop it, but it does seem to help some.
I’m not quite sure exactly how to accomplish this, or at least accomplish it as inexpensively and simply as possible and within the resources available at The Gulch, but would keeping the firewood stack a foot off the ground eliminate the problem?
“…but would keeping the firewood stack a foot off the ground eliminate the problem?”
Not in my experience. Several years ago I put the firewood for one house up on blocks about a foot high on 4″ by 4″ crosspieces. It eliminated the total cover they’d have with wood on the ground – but they easily hopped right up and set up camp between the stacked (and covered) wood. If the wood were uncovered it would be less attractive – but they’d still work within the crevices – the tarp over it just gives ’em a better roof.
Since I don’t always have times to tend to such attractive nuisances – I at least get a grin when I see a bull snake slide up into the woodpile and stir them up.