A misremembered start of a fairy tale that was passed around the DarpaNet back when Richard was in grad school:
Ladle Rat Rotten Hut vent two sea irk groin-murder inner fore rest… (no, that’s not spam, say it fast.)
It took it awhile to find the new restaurant, and when it did, it was cute–Michelle and I both wondered at first if it were a large mouse. My! What big ears you have! With its small size, those ears, and slim build, it had us for a moment.
Till we saw the tail. Great. A Californian rat, thin and trim, ready to see and be seen
I was none too pleased. If only we had a cat. A little aversion therapy.
When I was in San Jose talking to the garage-top falconatics a few weeks ago, one told me she’d ditched her birdfeeder after finding she was supporting not only the local rat population but its next generation right there in her yard.
Last week, I got a flier from the Wild Bird Center saying they had just stocked up on seed catchers, and I’m definitely going to go buy me one, but meantime, I remembered what my daughter Sam had said about rats avoiding the smell of mint plants.
And I do have me some mint plants.
So I cut a sprig from the front yard, hoping it too would sprout roots in water and take off into a new plant, but if not, let it stand sentry till I can get more going, from seed or bought, I don’t care, and I put it in a plastic container on the patio. I turned a comfortable chair to face outwards to watch and knitted.
It wasn’t long, just a few minutes later, that the rat I’d scared off came out again.
And stopped. Its nose sniffled furiously.
It left.
It came back a few minutes later, stopped and sniffed again, took a few steps to the side to see if that would help, turned back to face the mint–it was still there. Rats. It ran away again.
Then over the next little bit I watched it try to take a wide berth around it to the right to get back to its intended dinner so infuriatingly close.  No go–till the squirrels, who didn’t pay it nor their little cousin no never-mind, had a fight and knocked the mint clear thataway. Yay! And the rat made a break for it.
For about a second till I reached the door, anyway.
On the next round, it took a wide berth around to the left this time, putting it out in the open air away from even so much as the protective covering of the awning overhead, the kind of exposure a rat hates. But the only way it could figure out how to get to those easy pickings. Smart little thing. In broad daylight, too!
So I upped the ante. I wasn’t going to use glass containers; I’m too much of a klutz and I’d seen how much momentum quarreling squirrels could produce. No shattering allowed. I took a plastic container from Costco that had held Alphonso mangoes, ie it looked like a giant clear egg carton, and cut it into two-section segments. I filled them with water and cut another sprig for each segment. I set all my containers on the patio fanned out in a wide circle encompassing the reach of the fallen birdseed, four times the intensity of the mint that had stopped the thing in its tracks before.
It has not come back. The birds don’t care about that little bit of leafy green down there, the squirrels ignore it, but that rat gave up unfed.
I have some mint seeds. I have pots. I have plants to top off as needed in the meantime.
One mint-woodcutter, to the rescue.
(July 24–one caveat. Since I wrote this, I found a site selling mint plants warning that they must be kept in pots: saying that the first year, you’ll wonder what all the fuss is about. The second year you’ll start to find out. They can send underground runners as far as 20 feet past weedblocker, whatever weedblocker is, and will take over everything. I knew they were fairly invasive but that’s more than I knew, so I thought I’d better put that in here for anybody coming googling by.)