Gardens are a place where flowers bloom and you can sit down and relax, but an unwelcome intruder can disrupt the harmony — the notorious rat. These pesky rodents threaten your garden’s aesthetic as they will eat your crops and leave droppings everywhere.

Plus, these pests also carry diseases like leptospirosis, salmonella, and hantavirus and can multiply insanely fast. So, if you notice any rodents in your garden, you need to act swiftly to eliminate them. Experts at Epic Gardening and Buzz Boss both agree on one deterrent when it comes to rats: onions.

Lorin Mielsen at Epic Gardening noted how onions are pungent and that rats “hate them”. 

Plus, you don’t even have to grow them for this trick to work. All you have to do is place an onion where you suspect the rats are entering, and “they will take one smell and run out of your garden”.

With this hack, it’s important to put out a new onion every couple of days, or it will rot. 

Alternatively, consider growing garlic around the exterior of your garden beds. That tends to repel several pests, not just rodents.

The pros at Buzz Boss claimed that onions are a “cooking staple that’s a nemesis of rats”.

They said: “It’s a powerful rat repellent because of its pungent smell and taste. Onion contains sulphur compounds that irritate the eyes and nose (of rats, too) and allicin, which can cause anaemia and oxygen deprivation in rats if ingested.”

However, the Buzz Boss pros recommend growing onions in the garden. This way, you will have a large supply of them.

Onion is a cool-season crop that can be grown from seeds, sets, or transplants. They prefer full sun and rich, moist soil. It can be harvested when the bulbs are fully formed and the tops start to yellow and fall over.