If you live near a forest or in mountainous areas, you need to use natural repellants, toy snakes, scarecrows, dogs, and smoke to protect vegetable garden from monkeys? Read here to learn more.
Having your own personal outdoor vegetable garden is great. You get to enjoy your delicious and super healthy homegrown vegetables every day, and you can also sell or process the surplus to make some extra income.
While it is undoubtedly beneficial to grow your own vegetables, especially when you live far from the city, it can become quite a headache if you have monkeys destroying and feasting on your product before you get the chance to enjoy them.
Not only can monkeys destroy an entire garden within a day, but a sick monkey can also contaminate your vegetables and put your health at risk. Therefore, if you live where monkeys can access your vegetable garden, you must protect your produce.
Keep reading to learn why it is important to protect your vegetable garden from monkeys and how you can go about it.
Why is it Important to Protect Your Vegetable Garden from Monkeys?
1. Monkeys Will Consume Most of Your Homegrown Vegetables
As exciting as growing your vegetable garden sounds, the task requires effort, consistency, and commitment.
Since most plants will take considerable time and multiple planting seasons to finally bear your healthy vegetables, you cannot grow your own garden if you lack patience.
Imagine you finally have fresh vegetables growing in your garden, only to have them destroyed by monkeys.
Monkeys and other primates like raccoons, and rats, share a significant amount of their genome with humans, which allows them to have the same diet as us. They enjoy most vegetable varieties and can digest them exactly as we do.
Hence, if you have an outdoor vegetable garden growing next to a hilly area populated by monkeys, or the forest, you can expect an attack before you get the chance to taste your produce.
Such an attack can lead to a drastic drop in your product as monkeys habitually consume or at least try whatever they can get their hands on.
As a result, you might either get discouraged from your gardening hobby or revert to buying vegetables from the local market.
2. Monkeys Can Pass Fatal Diseases to Humans
Moreover, another reason for protecting your vegetable garden from monkeys is that primates can carry contagious diseases that can be extremely dangerous to human beings.
These diseases include herpes B virus, infections, and rabies, which can be fatal.
Since most of our DNA is the same as a monkey, we can easily get infected by a sick monkey. If a disease-carrying monkey sneezes, coughs, or bites any of your products, the consumption of the contaminated vegetable will directly impact your own and your family’s health.
Hence, if your vegetable garden has undergone a monkey attack, you should avoid consuming any of your vegetables.
3. Monkeys Can be Dangerous to Humans and House Pets
Furthermore, if you do nothing to protect your vegetable garden from monkeys, you will end up encouraging them to enter your property whenever they like.
Since monkeys have incredibly long and sharp canines and can grow to be much stronger than an average human, they can attack and possibly kill you or any pets you have.
What Vegetables Do Monkeys Usually Attack or Feast on?
Although monkeys can generally digest most of the vegetables we humans can, they do have their favorites.
If you are growing either of the vegetables listed below in your outdoor garden, you must act quickly.
How to Know if Monkeys Have Been in Your Vegetable Garden?
Usually, it is almost impossible to miss if monkeys have attacked your vegetable garden. As mentioned above, most primates have huge appetites and can be highly destructive animals.
Even if they do not desire to consume more vegetables, they might still pluck them out of the ground and take a bite out of curiosity.
When this happens, people generally do not know if a monkey or some other animal attacked their garden.
If you too are confused about which animal has been visiting your outdoor vegetable garden behind your back, pay attention to the following signs that may hint some monkey business:
- Your vegetable garden is missing most of the garden vegetables.
- You can find huge bite marks on the vegetables.
- Entire vegetables and plants have been pulled out of the soil.
- You can spot lots of uneaten vegetables thrown around your garden and property.
- You can find monkey feces all over your garden.
Natural Wats To Protect Vegetable Garden from Monkeys
Now that you know that monkeys pose a serious threat to not only your vegetable garden but to you as well, you must do everything in your power to monkey-proof your garden as soon as possible.
For this, pay attention to some of the top ways listed below that can help you protect your vegetable garden from destructive monkeys.
1. Secure Your Garden with Fences
One of the best ways to limit monkeys from entering your vegetable garden is by constructing a fence around it.
The bars of the fence needs to be close enough to prevent smaller monkeys from passing through, and the fence should also cover the entire garden from the top.
2. Use Natural Monkey Repellants
Although one can find high noise frequency monkey repellents in the market, these devices are known to cause animal pain and great discomfort.
Hence, instead of using an automated repellant that will put your neighboring primates in a lot of distress, choose a natural repellant that does not harm the monkey in any way.
For this, sprinkle your garden vegetables with powdered pepper or a pepper and water solution.
Since monkeys hate the smell and taste of pepper, you will successfully protect your garden without hurting the animal.
3. Construct a Greenhouse Around Your Garden
While keeping an eye on a small vegetable garden is generally easier, the real challenge begins when your garden spreads across your entire property.
Since you cannot always monitor your entire vegetable garden, it is best to secure the area by boxing it within a greenhouse.
Not only will a fully constructed greenhouse keep the monkeys out, but it will also prevent birds and rodents from feasting on your produce.
Moreover, although a large greenhouse can be an expensive project to begin, the benefits it eventually offers usually make the entire investment worth it.
4. Use Smoke to Discourage Monkeys from Entering Your Property
Since monkeys are a lot like us, their instincts also tell them to steer clear of smoke and fire. Fortunately, you can use this to your advantage.
If you have too many or large monkeys destroying your vegetable garden, do not make the mistake of approaching them without a plan.
Instead, use fire or smoke to scare off the monkeys far away from your property. Usually, monkeys who scurry away out of fear do not return too quickly.
5. Use Loud Noises to Scare off the Monkeys
Apart from smoke and repellents, you can also use a horn to create loud, sudden noises to scare the monkeys away from your land.
6. Use Toy Snakes
Finally, if you are leaving town and cannot stick around to use a honk or smoke to scare the monkeys, throw in a few realistic-looking toy snakes in your vegetable garden.
Since snakes tend to kill monkeys in the wild, this tip will help you keep monkeys out of your garden for quite a long time.
Signs of Other Animals that Can Potentially Destroy Your Vegetable Garden
| Other Animals that Can Attack a Vegetable Garden | Signs of the Presence of the Respective Animals |
| Voles | Voles come out of shallow snake-like tunnels and usually gnaw on plant roots and stems instead of the vegetable itself |
| Moles | Moles leave raised ridges that crisscross across the land. You will also find multiple mounds of dirt across your property. |
| Bats | Bats feast on multiple vegetables without fully finishing one complete vegetable. |
| Squirrels | Squirrels will leave scratches and tiny bite marks on vegetables they did not even eat. |
| Raccoons | Raccoons with scratch and bite different vegetables will topple your garbage cans and will leave droppings all over the place. |
| Skunks | Skunks will leave behind a faint, musky smell that is impossible to miss. |
| Rabbits | Rabbits will attack a garden in huge numbers and will eat most of the vegetables. You will find multiple snake-like burrows and mounds of dirt across your property. |
| Deers | Deer hooves make distinct patterns on the soil. |
Final Thoughts
If you live near a forest or in a mountainous area, you must use natural repellants, toy snakes, fences, and smoke to protect your vegetable garden from monkeys.
My name is Olivia, and I live in the United States and love having plants in my garden. Lots of plants are there on my balcony, indoor and outdoor garden also. Here I am trying to share useful gardening tips, how to grow and care for various plants, etc.
