Keeping Your Garden Safe Makes Your Home Safer
Home safety has always been of great importance. Even more so when it comes to protecting your property from criminal behavior, like burglaries, break-ins, or home invasions. Feeling protected and safe from malfeasance in our own home gives us a better quality of life in every aspect.
As with many things, safety often hinges on good preparation and prevention. Making your home difficult to break into is likely going to deter burglars or other criminals from targeting it in the first place. And while frequently the house itself is well protected, with all safety measures taken to prevent break-ins, one important part of it is forgotten and remains unattended in terms of safety: the garden.
House gardens can be excellent shelters for thieves and burglars without the proper safety measures. Unfortunately, often people forget that a criminal can hide in a shed or behind thick bushes, find tools to break into the house, and generally use the garden as a way to stay undetected while trying to find vulnerabilities in the house’s protections.
Furthermore, gardens themselves can be considered ‘easy pickings’ for thieves and burglars. Often, garden tools, expensive gardening machinery, and even garden decorations, furniture, and the like are easily stolen from gardens, setting back the owners hundreds or even thousands of euros.
Fortunately, there are ways to fortify your garden and make it less burglar-friendly by following the tips below:
Design your garden to be inhospitable to burglars
Make sure that your garden has as few hiding spots as possible. You can do this by keeping the garden fences low. If your garden is easily viewable from the street, burglars are not likely to try to find shelter in it.
Secure the fences and walls in the parts of the garden not easily seen from the street. Make it hard for the garden to be accessed from those sides and keep any doors secure and hard to force.
Consider making garden paths out of gravel and other materials that make it hard to walk soundlessly on them.
Make your garden’s fences hard to touch or climb on by using thorny plants or very thick bushes.
Maintain the feeling that anyone in your garden is seen
Keeping your garden well-lit is very important. Making a burglar feel that their presence will be noted at any time makes the garden feel inhospitable and even dangerous to them. You can achieve that by installing powerful lights that switch on with movement on all garden paths and flowerbeds that can be walked on.
Install CCTV cameras that monitor your garden around the clock. It is known that cameras act as deterrents for most criminals and burglars and make your garden inhospitable to them. Additionally, in the event anyone braves your garden, the latest technology cameras with AI will alert you about the intrusion so that intervention can take place before any crime is committed.
Secure your movable property
If you have a shed where you keep gardening tools, it is very important to secure it. Install a strong door lock and fortify it further with a shed alarm. That way if anyone tries to open the door, you will be alerted. It probably will also result in the burglar fleeing.
Make sure that your shed keeps your equipment out of sight of any prospective burglars. It’s best that a shed has no windows. Keep your equipment marked as your own in ways that burglars can’t easily erase. Consider keeping tools that can be used to access your house more easily, such as tall ladders, inside your home rather than in the garden. If you do keep them in the garden shed, make sure they are further secured and unable to be removed from the shed without an additional key.
Secure garden furniture by bolting them down in place, cementing them in place, or securing them with ground or earth anchors so that it’s hard or impossible to remove.