Peppermint Oil Will Help Keep Mice Out Of Your Pantry. Who Knew.

There are a lot of testimonials online of people controlling mice with peppermint oil. It may not be a surprise that using peppermint oil to keep away mice is not a burgeoning area in scientific research, but the testimonials have me minting up my food storage areas.

Here are a few ideas on how to get peppermint oil into mousy areas like your pantry:

• Use the “cotton ball” approach in your mousy areas. The pantry is an obvious place in our house. Put a couple of drops of peppermint oil on a cotton ball or a piece of a sponge and place them throughout your pantry. The cotton ball or sponge absorbs the oil and acts as a little mouse repeller.
• When you actually clean your pantry out, add some peppermint oil to your cleaning water. In our case, we scrub the shelves once and then wipe them again. It’s the second wiping where we add the peppermint oil, so that there is a coating of peppermint oil on the shelves themselves. Alternatively, you could spritz your clean shelves (or I suppose even your dirty shelves) with a minty spray diluted as described below. You can use this same idea on any large mousy area in your house.
• If you have a room where mouse traffic is particularly bad, use the cotton ball concept but you can also add come peppermint oil to your mop water or spritz a bit on the carpet with a spray bottle — ten drops of oil in a regular kitchen-sized spray bottle.

Field mice are a big problem in the spring here making this mint project a key part of spring cleaning.

Where to Buy Peppermint Oil

You want an oil that has not been diluted with a cheaper oil but in this application the oil doesn’t actually have to be food grade. We do buy food grade peppermint oil because we use it for other purposes. We buy it in bulk anyway and so the cost is not prohibitive. This is our source for bulk oils but you can find peppermint oil on Amazon as well (here).