About Yard Tactic

What this site is

Yard Tactic is an independent publication covering yard pest and predator control for homeowners, gardeners and small acreage property owners. We write about the three things you can actually do when something is eating, digging or biting: shut it out, make the spot unpleasant, or remove the animal.

Everything here is written to help you make one decision quickly and correctly. If you already know your problem, you should be able to reach a specific recommendation in under a minute. If you do not know what caused the damage, we help you name it first, because buying gear before you have identified the animal is the most common and most expensive mistake in this whole category.

Why this site exists

Search for almost any yard pest problem and you land in one of two places. The first is a university extension page or a state wildlife agency fact sheet. Those are accurate and genuinely useful, but they will not tell you which product to buy, because it is not their job to. The second is a thin roundup of ten near identical products with star ratings and no explanation of whether any of them can work on your animal at all.

The gap between those two is where people lose money. Someone buys a four foot deer fence because it was cheaper, and the deer clears it on the first night. Someone buys two inch mesh for rabbits and watches a young cottontail walk straight through it. The product was not defective. It was the wrong size for the animal, and nothing they read told them that.

Yard Tactic was built to close that gap: authoritative enough to explain why a barrier works, and decisive enough to name the specification you need before you spend anything.

What we cover

The site is organised around the three tactics available to a property owner, in the order we recommend trying them.

• Fencing, netting and barriers. Physical exclusion for deer, rabbits, groundhogs, birds and garden beds. Heights, mesh openings, wire gauge, buried edges and post spacing.
• Sprays, repellents and deterrents. Scent, taste and sensory deterrents for moles, mosquitoes, roaches and browsing animals. Coverage area, active ingredients, reapplication intervals and label restrictions.
• Traps and trapping guides. Removal when exclusion is impractical and repellents keep washing away. Placement, runway identification, and the legal checks you need to make first.

Alongside those, our reviews section covers individual products and head to head comparisons for the same jobs.

How we research

Our recommendations are research based. Every guide is assembled from published information rather than from personal use, and we are specific about that because you should know how a recommendation was built before you trust it with your money.

• Manufacturer specifications. Height, mesh opening, wire gauge, roll length, coverage area, active ingredient concentration and stated reapplication interval. Numbers first, because a number can be checked and an adjective cannot.
• Published documentation. Product manuals, safety data sheets, EPA registered label text where applicable, and guidance published by university extension services and state wildlife agencies.
• Verified owner reports. Reviews from verified purchasers, read in volume and across climates. A single complaint is noise. The same complaint from dozens of owners in comparable conditions is a pattern, and patterns are what we report.
• A stated limit on every pick. Each recommendation names the situation it cannot handle. A recommendation without a limit is an advertisement.

Where a figure is not published by the manufacturer, we write that it is not specified rather than estimating it.

What we do not do

How we make money

Yard Tactic is supported by affiliate commissions. Some links on this site are affiliate links, which means we may earn a commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. Yard Tactic is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

Commission never changes which product we recommend or what we say about it. If the honest answer is that a cheaper product is the better fit, or that you do not need to buy anything at all, that is what the guide will say. Our full disclosure is on the affiliate disclosure page.

Corrections

Specifications change. Products get revised, discontinued and relabelled. If you find a figure on this site that does not match the current manufacturer documentation, tell us and we will check it and update the guide. Write to hello@yardtactic.com or use the contact page.