When we first looked at the home we purchased, the real estate agent was afraid to go downstairs to show dh the basement, for fear of mice. Dh found mouse poisoning down there, but we have never seen a mouse here yet. Course having cats has helped I'm sure.

Do you have mice on your homestead? If so, how do you get rid of them?

We did have a problem the first year we moved here but the last few haven't been too bad. The cats in the barn and the dog help but if I "suspect", we have pellets that we get from the feed store to get "rid" of them!

I must add: Don't you just love that aroma when there is a dead mouse in the walls that you can't get to so you just have to wait it out!! It's usually when company is coming too! lol!!

I occassionally get one in the house but they are caught quick in the trap I have set. It drives me nuts how they get in! I've checked everywhere! They usually get in the house in the fall. I'm sure they feel the heat coming out any little hole on the outside and that is how they find their way in. Now the barn is another matter. Much harder to keep them out of there. I don't set poison in the house because there is no where to put it that is safe from the cat and dogs. I won't take the chance. But I put it in the barn. It's poison that dries the mouse out from the inside out so there is no smell of rotten dead mouse.

Oh yeah, we've got mice. The love to get in all the feed. We have cats also and are forever finding little presents of dead mice at the back door. We've had some to die in the walls before as well, Yuck! We do not set out poison but just use plain old mousetraps when the cats are not getting them fast enough. This is Mel's job - I don't do mice, snakes or spiders. Last weekend I was cleaning and found a black widow spider in the basement. I promptly went and got Mel and told him and then I stayed upstairs until the spider and any friends were gotten rid of.

I have come to the conclussion that mise, like dust are things you learn to deal with when living in an old farm house in the country.

Here's a good mouse story for you! :hurray:

A few years ago, a friend of mine who had recently moved here from South America was talking with me on the phone. They had just moved to a house in a country subdivision with fields on all sides. All of a sudden she starts screaming bloody murder like I've never heard anyone scream and just hangs up the phone! I am petrified thinking that one of her children just went head first down the stairs, but since her house is 45 minutes from here, running over there wasn't an option. I waited 5 minutes and called her back. You guessed it. A mouse had run across the floor and she and all five kids were up on the table!!! She was petrified and was scared to death that it would bite the kids! I had to laugh (to myself of course) - but she had never had a mouse in her house so she just didn't know any better! She was ready to call the exterminator and I told her don't do that - just have DH stop at Walmart on the way home and get a mouse trap.

I guess country life isn't for everyone!!!

In the early fall this year we had quite a few mice get in - but we had done an addition on our home and there were plenty of open spaces at the time for them to find their way in! We have two indoor cats that are useless for killing mice. They love to play with them but their favorite thing is to let them go so they can keep playing! I remember as a kid staying at my cousins house - they had mice galore and I remember them running across our bare feet at night when we would sleep on the floor. Must be I've lost alot of my nerve....no way could I do that again...and get any sleep!

We use the poison pellets outdoors in the barn when the mice get out of control. We have rabbits in pens in our barn, so the spilled feed is an open invitation for them to come. I don't mind a mouse here or there, but have to admit they give me the willies. I just make sure to put the pellets up high on a ledge where a stray cat won't find them. In the house, we use mouse traps - the new kind that have a release latch so you don't have to touch the mouse or snap yourself trying to set it.

The thing that scares me about the pellets is that if an animal were to eat the mouse, Say it wasn't dead yet, then they could die. A friend was loosing a lot of her chickens in her barn. she quit using poison and they quit dying.

We used to have mice when we first moved here, but now we have cats that live out in the barn so I haven't seen a sign of a mouse.

We had a mouse in the well house, but some pellets took care of it in fairly short order. We have a full compliment of 9 full time cats and one part time cat, and they're earning their feed and have been since the summer. We have one that will take a snake over a mouse any day. We feed her extra and love on her a lot, she's our favorite kitty. ;)

I have a few mice stories. ugh

One was when we were living in an old cottage on a lake. I knew there were mice sometimes because I remembered while growing up that my grandmother was always putting out moth balls and traps in this same house etc.

Anyway, we would sometimes hear them, but never saw even the smallest sign of one until one died. Oh man. That was the worst.

Then when we were renting a place in the country last year, I saw a glimpse of a mouse running across the kitchen. I absolutely flipped out. I could occasionally hear a mouse, but never saw one. I made Gabe gets traps. He caught one the following day and I thought I could rest easily. Then I started hearing the little rustling in between the walls again. I was pregnant and was not taking it well at all.

Then one night I heard some crashing of pans and a mouse was in with my baking pans. YUCK. We trapped again and Gabe bought some type of mouse killing concoction.

Then one night I am in bed and I felt something on my foot and screamed so loud that I know every person within a mile had to hear me. I whipped the sheets off the bed and the whole house was up and it was one of Zachary's little toys in the bed. lol

Later that week, we're in the bedroom and I hear a noise and look in the room and there was a mouse walking all super slow and drunk. Gabe just picked him up and tossed him outside. YUCK.

I was never so happy as when we moved from that place. There was just no avoiding mice because we were in a heavily wooded area.

Now in this house, I have yet to see a mouse inside the house, but I have seen a couple on our porch and just saw one in the garage a couple of weeks ago. :(

Funny I should come across this question today. We just had an episode here today that I found hilarious. I'm in bed this morning and the cats are banging against the bottom of the bed, I yell for 'em to get out because I think they are play/fighting. Anyway, I get up and a mouse takes off across the floor. I go tell dh and dd there's a mouse in our bedroom. So anyway I have two siamese cats, dh and dd all in the bedroom trying to catch this thing for over an hour. Squealing, laughing going on, and yes, dh was squealing just like dd, lol. After a while I ran everybody out and got dh to set a trap, couple hours later it's caught. Siamese are big wimps! They just ran after the thing like it was a toy and never touched it, ugh! We have an outside kitty that would have made mincemeat out of it in 5 seconds!

And I have to share my gross experience. People with weak stomachs, please don't read this part. We lived in an old Victorian house we were renovating and we were being taken over by mice because the house had so many holes. After catching at least 15 mice in traps we thought we had them all. Suddenly something started smelling horrible in the kitchen and kept getting worse to the point I just felt nauseated every time I went in there. I searched and searched and finally found~a dead mouse hung up in the back of the refrigerator in a small rectangular space where it had gotten trapped and died~it was sooooo gross because it had started to turn into liquid goop, it was sooo rotten and smelled soooo gross and I had to scoop and dig all this dead liquid stuff out of that little space. It's a wonder I didn't toss my cookies, I've never been so grossed out. I hope to never have an experience like that one again, ugh! If we had been rich I would have just tossed out the refrigerator and bought a new one, it was soooo awful.

Doodlebug,
You definitely get the Golden Mouse Award! Yikes! I think I would have hauled that fridge out onto the front lawn and hosed it off! The fun we get to have as homeowners, huh?!!!!

These stories have been a hoot to read! :hurray:

Ever wonder why those mice can't just stay out of little holes and walls, etc. They always pick the very worst places to die. Glad it was your refrig and not mine. Mel would have had to take care of it at my house. I would have :puke:

got them, don't want them ;) All year I did good with none getting into even the basement, that was because I found out in early fall I had a big old snake living down there, now if the snake would have promised me he wouldn't come upstairs into the house I would have let him stay to take care of the mice that decide to come in when the weather gets cold, but since he didn't promise me, I had to take him outside, kept him alive to handle the mice on the outside of the place. Every year it seems we get a small family of them. This year I found 4 in the basement, yuck!!! I use the pellets in the basement and apparently that was their last feast. No matter how clean you keep your home, when you live in the country there are always mice trying to seek shelter from the cold weather, and with all this corn around here I'm surprised, but thankful, we don't get more :)

Mice and bats at my place. Actually, we haven't had a bat for over a year, but took out 3 of them within 2 months of living in the place. Dh can hear mice running through the walls, I can't... it's his job to be the exterminator - I leave all mouse-related jobs to him!

I found a "deposit" on my desk this morning! Examining it, I thought, oh great! Then I remembered I was eating brown rice the night before. :lol2:

Margret, roflmbo!!!

Farmgirl and Sara I got a chuckle from your stories. Fil is fighting a mouse battle right now for the past year. They are in the walls, in upstairs and down. Little tapping clicking feet running and pattering along. Fil sets traps, poison, and some ultrasonic gizmo. It all worked but the mice are back and fil is in a bit of denial.

My sister calls her traps, traplines and at one point there her kids would manage the traplines every day as part of the chores.

You can't get away from them if you have fields nearby or as in fil's case neighbors in older homes. They come in for winter, and stay for generations. Cats help as long as they know what to do. Some don't. Depends, if you get one from a good mouser of a mama cat who showed her kittens how to hunt them.