Back information before I get to the problem at hand. I live at the end of the road. I have 5 gardens that back into mine from the next street over. The village I live in is completely surrounded by vegetative farmlands. My husband and I have been working our butts off since we moved into this house 2.5 years ago. The inside needed to be stripped and redone and we are still working on it ourselves as and when we can. We have a very long garden which was a complete mess when we moved in. It took the entire first summer to get it looking ok. We’ve since put in 8 raised beds, 4 fruit trees, 5 fruit bushes (that we intend to keep short out of respect to the end two neighbours). We like to keep our grass a bit longer than usual for ladybugs and such, but short enough to push our manual mower through. This has apparently been an issue for one of the neighbours because she has to see it, but won’t put a higher fence up. We have a large chicken and duck run (about 6’tall by 10’ long by 6’wide) which we told the back 2 neighbours would be put where it is, they had no issues with it. To our other side, that neighbour hasn’t finished their fence yet (it’s been a year and a half left where it is), his neighbours fence isn’t complete, their neighbour doesn’t have a fence the other side, etc all the way to the end of the road. Only 1 of the 5 neighbours gardens that back onto mine has a proper fence. The others are a hedge, sheet metal, a chain link fence, and a badly damaged fence that we can’t fix because there is too much ivy growing up it. We’ve been very neighbourly to the last 2 because they seemed nice and are elderly. We gave the last guy some duck and chicken eggs with no expectations of him giving us anything, but he said he couldn’t take them if we didn’t accept vegetables from his garden and so we started swapping food. It was great. Then a few weeks ago my husband was letting the girls out of their coop in the morning and the last guy confronted him saying if we don’t get rid of the rats, he’d contact the local authority. I’m at a loss for what to do because as I said, we are surrounded by farmlands so rats are to be expected. They scurry through everyone’s gardens and all we can do is take preventative measures in our own gardens. Even the neighbourhood cats can’t scare them off. We even stopped adding anything to our compost pile to try and prevent them coming in for it once we realised there were rats. I’m wondering if corrugated metal driven into the soil about 3’ would deter them going to his garden from ours(although they’ve always been in his garden, he’s just looking for a fight as he starts fights with everyone in the neighbourhood apparently). I’m so tempted to ask him to do something about the pidgins that roost in his massive oak tree that overhangs our vegetable garden and therefore eat my seedlings 
. Maybe I’ll call the LA on him for not dealing with them. See how ridiculous that sounds? It is impossible for us to solely take care of all of the rats.
. Maybe I’ll call the LA on him for not dealing with them. See how ridiculous that sounds? It is impossible for us to solely take care of all of the rats.
