Thinking Outside the Box Can solve lots of things.
Not the least is keeping raccoons from your new turf lawn.
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Many years ago, my husband and I moved to North Vancouver. It’s a suburb across the inlet from Vancouver. We lived as far up the mountain as the tree line. At that time, we had two sons.
Shortly after moving, we had a problem. We fenced in our side yard and needed to put it on the lawn. We choose turf — a process of planting shallow grass roots in the yard. You lay it out in long rolls, and your grass is beautiful overnight.
We hoped it would take root quickly and have a nice yard for the boys to play in. When something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
The day we laid the turf was long, but the grass looked great. It continued to look great for a couple of days.
Then about three days later, we got up to find someone had come into our yard and rolled back about three feet of the turf during the night. We thought this was kids and hi jinx, but the thing was, it was so organized. Hmm.
Raccoons?
Every morning when I went out, someone had rolled back the turf, and I would unroll it and tamp it back down. The problem was that it never had time to attach to the soil and start growing.
After a few days of this, we saw one raccoon in the yard still finishing dinner and realized what was happening. These raccoons were rolling back the turf to get at the grubs.
I received suggestions to get rid of the raccoons from my neighbors. First, they suggested I put out mothballs. They stunk, and the neighbors told me the raccoons wouldn’t stay where the smell permeated.
Nobody told the raccoons. They pushed aside the mothballs and carried on.
I removed all the mothballs and threw them away. We had a loose fence around the yard and were worried that the neighborhood dogs might come in and eat them.
I knew that mothballs could be pretty toxic and didn’t want any creature, animal, or human to get into this. I just wanted to keep the raccoons away long enough to get the grass to grow.
