Voles and Gophers

Ruthless murderers.

After a particularly bad year, that’s how I describe gophers and voles.

We had an explosion in the vole population.  In nine seasons at this property, we never had to deal with voles before.  But here they were this year, devouring everything.

We prefer live traps, but this year the only way to preserve any of our vegetables was to place mouse traps every few feet in the garden.  It helped.

One method that was suggested to me recently by another gardener is to dig a hole near your crops, place a bucket with bait in the whole.  The voles will crawl in, but won’t be able to mange to get back out.  We plant to try that next year.

As for gophers, they will most often burrow to the roots of your vegetables and pull the plant into their burrow and have their feast.  To eliminate gophers, one needs to put mesh screening 8-12 inches below the soil surface to block the plant from the gopher.

To trap and kill gophers, one needs to bury gopher traps into one of the gopher tunnels.

Here is a link to a gopher trap on Amazon that has received a 4.5 rating (out of five) with 208 reviews (as of this writing.)