How To Stop Foxes Digging In Your Garden

Foxes are a common sight across most urban areas such as gardens. Foxes usually come out at night and like to hide in small, secluded areas to make their dens, hence foxes liking gardens.

However, foxes can become nuisances, especially when they are digging in your garden ruining your plants and vegetable patches. Therefore, it is important to follow the steps in this article to understand the best ways of stopping foxes digging in your garden.

Having foxes digging up your garden can be a nuisance; however, this article will explore the four main fox deterrents that you can use to stop foxes digging in your garden.

These fox deterrents are:

• Dig stopper prickle strips
• Ultrasonic animal repeller
• Scoot fox repellent
• Aspectek animal repellent

What Attracts A Fox To A Garden?

Before you can attempt to deter foxes from digging in your garden it is important to know what attarcts foxes to your garden in the first place. Below are a number of reasons foxes could be attracted to your garden.

Easy access to your garden

The first reason that foxes could be coming into your garden is because it has easy access. This could be through a variety of places. Some of the common places that a fox could be getting into your garden could be through a hole in a fence, over a low wall, or even across a low flat roof.

If you have easy access into your garden, then this may encourage the foxes to continue to enter your garden. Therefore, finding out how your fox may be getting in is the best way to stop them from entering. Foxes tend to follow a habit, so if you find where they are entering and fix the problem they should stop.

If you want to stop foxes coming into your garden, you need to make the access as difficult as possible, and they will soon give up.

Having good hiding places

Foxes love to have hiding places, they use these to help themselves feel safe. Foxes like to roam and find safe places that they can build dens or run to in case of emergencies. So, if your garden has lots of small hiding paces then this could be a reason you may find foxes in your garden.

Foxes are great at remembering and locating where small places are in gardens, especially if you have things like decking or sheds. Also, if you have junk like boxes or pallets in your garden then these are perfect hiding places for foxes to use as their dens.

Therefore, if you want to ensure that foxes are not disturbing your garden then it is best to keep them as clutter free as possible. Also, if you have decking or sheds, then you should try to keep these blocked up so that foxes cannot get into them.

This is even more important between November and February as this is when foxes give birth to their cubs. So, during this time they hunt for somewhere comfortable and secluded to raise their cubs.

Open patches of soil

If you have open patches of soil in your garden, then this could be another reason that foxes are attracted to your garden. Foxes like to eat earthworms and grubs so if you have a lot of soil then foxes will try and dig it up.

If you have a lot of flowerbeds, potted plants, or vegetable patches then naturally foxes will gravitate to these as well. Your fox problem could arise if there has been heavy rain as the soil will be softer.

If it is around the months that foxes give birth (November-February) then you may notice fox cubs digging your garden as they are practising on areas that are easy to dig up. There are things that you can put in your garden to prevent the foxes from digging, but this will be discussed below.

Scraps for the birds

If you like to feed your birds and have seeds lying around your garden, then this could be another reason that you may have foxes. This will happen more if you decide to throw scraps out for the birds to eat. This will encourage foxes to keep coming back if they have a constant food supply.

Therefore, if you want foxes to stop coming into your garden you should stop throwing scraps out. If you want to feed the birds, you should try and contain this in a bird feeder and stick to bird seed and grains rather than food scraps like meat.

Leaving things out overnight

The last main thing that would encourage foxes into your garden is leaving things out overnight. This could be anything from dog chews, shoes, children’s toys, tools, or gardening gloves. If you do tend to leave these things out overnight, then this could attract fox cubs as they are curious animals.

Leaving these types of items in the garden is the perfect invitation for foxes. The fox cubs will use items to chew, play or even to practise hunting. Whereas adult foxes can use these items to demonstrate how to hunt to their young.

How To Stop Foxes Digging In Your Garden? (4 Fox Deterrents)

There is nothing worse than having a fresh garden and finding that something (foxes) has spent the night digging it up. Although do not worry, there are four fox deterrents that you can use to stop foxes from digging in your garden.

Dig Stopper Prickle Strips

These dig stopper prickle strips are great at stopping foxes and other animals from digging in your garden. This prickle strip comes in the size 28cm x 2cm, so it can cover a good size of your garden, however you may need more than one if you have a bigger garden.

These work to protect things like potted plants, flowerbeds, and vegetable patches from being ruined by animals that love to dig. Prickle strips are rows of meshed plastic spikes that you put on top of the soil. This ensures that no animals can get into the areas of your garden that has soil.

Although you should not worry about it ruining your plants or vegetables as the gaps in the mesh is wide enough to allow plants to grow through them. This is a very effective way of protecting your garden.

Prickle strips have spikes to ensure that the foxes do not walk or dig on the soil in your garden it does not cause injury. Instead, it just makes it uncomfortable for the animal to walk or dig on, this is how it helps to prevent the foxes from digging.

However, if you do decide to use Dig Stopper Prickle Strips then you need to make sure that you secure them into the ground. They usually come with fixing pins, but you could use tent pegs, both would be effective on ensuring that your prickle strips do not fly away.

Ultrasonic animal repeller

Another easy way to prevent foxes from digging in your garden is an ultrasonic animal repeller. This works to stop the foxes coming into your garden completely. It is a great animal repeller as it gives off a high-pitched blast every time a fox or another animal comes into the garden and sets off the motion sensor.

These work well for foxes and other animals in your garden, but they do not annoy humans as the sound is too high-pitched, making this a very effective way of preventing foxes digging.

This animal repeller can be a long-term solution to your fox problem especially if you face it where the foxes tend to enter into your garden. As this is a long-term solution, it does not work overnight. It works to gradually change the behaviour of the foxes and for them to associate your garden with the annoying high-pitch noise that this ultrasonic animal repeller gives off.

Therefore, this way of deterring foxes is a low maintenance but effective way of reducing foxes digging away at your beloved garden.

Scoot Fox Repellent

The scoot fox repellent works well if you want to be more hands on in protecting your garden from foxes.

Like dogs, foxes spray their urine to mark their territories to send messages that the space is already occupied. Whereas this scoot repellent releases a new scent into the garden. This works to try and trick the foxes that the space has already been taken so that they will move on. Although you will need to regularly apply this to ensure the foxes continue to stay away.

Scoot fox repellent comes in sachets of 50g, and each box contains two sachets. These sachets should cover up to 34 square-metres. It is best to spray this powder where you do not want the foxes to dig as well as entry points. This will help to deter foxes from entering.

It is important that you regularly respray the garden with this powder. When you first spray the fox repellent, the foxes will rebel and often foul or urine in spots to try and reclaim the area, however this will not last long if you keep spraying your garden regularly. Hence the importance of regular spraying, usually every 2-3 days for a couple of weeks.

Although this is a great way of preventing foxes from digging in your garden, you do not need to worry about your pets or plants as it is pet and plant friendly.

Aspectek Animal Repellent

Lastly, you can use Aspectek animal repellent to stop foxes from digging up your garden. This is a very effective way of ridding your garden from foxes. This animal repellent has built in solar panels which helps to make this a cost-effective way of ensuring foxes stay away.

This smart device gives off red lights which act as though the fox is being watched by another animal whilst sending wavelengths of an animal that the fox is afraid of to repel the foxes. As foxes are not confrontational animals, they would rather flee than face the ‘animal’ in the garden.

The Aspectek animal repellent can either be hung up in trees or on fences, although it should be no higher than 20-40 cm off the ground as it is meant to replicate animal eyes. It can also be stuck into the ground using its ground stake. Being able to put it in the ground or hang it somewhere makes this device very effective in deterring foxes.

This animal repellent is highly sensitive. In fact, it can detect foxes and other animals up to 10m away and covers an angle of 110 degrees from left to right. However, for this to be effective you need to ensure that it always charged. If there is not much sun to charge through the solar panels then you can charge it through a USB port.

As this only really works in the dark, it is always best to pair with another method of fox repellent like the ones listed above. But the Aspectek animal repellent is a low-maintenance, convenient method of reducing the foxes digging away at your garden.

Conclusion

To conclude, foxes can be beautiful animals, but they can also cause chaos. There are many things in your garden that could be unintentionally attracting foxes.

Some of the reasons that foxes could be attracted to your garden is because it has easy access, has good hiding places, has open patches of soil, plenty of bird scraps, or because you have left things out overnight. If you do any of these things, then you could expect to see foxes in your garden which can become problematic.

However, there are some things that you can do to help stop foxes being attracted to and digging in your garden. These could be using dig stopper prickle strips, an ultrasonic animal repeller, scoot fox repellent, or Aspectek animal repellent. Using one of these methods could allow your garden to be free of foxes, although it is always best to pair these repellents together to maximise effectiveness.