The bane of the vegetable garden. Not to be confused with moles (see below) who eat earthworms, leave mounds of dirt in the lawn, but do not harm your plants, gophers kill vegetables and fruit trees, rose bushes and other landscaping by eating their roots.
I have played tug of war in the garden with these voracious rodents and they are high on the list of foes to any dedicated vegetable gardener. Nothing is more aggravating than to go out and find a previously vigorous plant suddenly short and wilted, slumped into the hole where its roots used to be.
Gopher damage and prevention depends on the numbers you are dealing with. These little critters propagate like the prey animal that they are, are not deterred by noisemakers or most repellents, and send in new troops to replace the fallen. Thus our most effective method here is trapping and good cats. A friend also had success with a good dog (rat terrier) but the holes he left were larger than the gophers made. If you poison them and a cat or dog gets them afterwards, they can be affected by the poison as well, so we don't recommend that.
If you are not keen on actually killing them off, there are some moderately effective repellents, such as Castor bean/oil – but the truth is barricading them from the plants or reducing their numbers is the only real method if you have a lot of them. In a really wet winter some of them seem to drown (ditto yellowjackets). Simple cages around the roots of plants rarely work. Even raised beds are ineffective unless they are both tall enough gophers cannot climb over the top and have a gopher proof barrier underneath. We know folks who put a 2 inch deep layer of broken glass under a bed and the gophers came through, and they easily scaled the 10 inch sides of our strawberry bed.
We are about to add some new raised beds to our garden. More than 16 inches tall and lined with 1/2 inch hardware cloth they will be a safe haven for gopher delectables such as potatoes, onions, carrots and garlic, cole crops and parsley. Sometimes peppers. And peas. Sigh.---
Gopher story: I had heard several times that gophers would eat Juicyfruit gum and it would clog up their insides & kill them. Many years back I saw this mentioned yet another time in Herb Caen’s column in the SF Chronicle (long time back ) and that pushed me to try it. In certain times of the year they leave their tunnels open to the surface. During that time I placed an unwrapped stick of gum in the holes. Several hours later I would check and Lo! The gum was gone.
I repeated the procedure... A case of Juicyfruit later they were happily consuming all the gum I could give them with no end in sight. I had no idea if constipated gophers were piling up underground or if it just wasn’t working. So we decided to put the gum in the tunnel behind a standard Macabee Gopher Trap. A nasty piece of work that pierces the rodent to death, these traps can be very effective if you find their main tunnel, up to 15 inches deep, and place 2 of these traps, one going each direction. Cover the hole with sod or a board and some dirt to keep the light out, etc.. But for the gum experiment that wasn’t an option, there is really no way to “bait” these traps. So we set them in the feeder surface tunnels near where we placed the gum, but the gophers generally just set off the traps by pushing dirt into them, took the gum and left.
So I had the idea of getting a couple of rat traps (gophers are considerably larger than mice), as they can be effectively baited. Bait in place, I set the traps on the surface of the ground outside the open tunnel. This is 100% opposite everything you have ever heard about dealing with gophers, but I couldn’t figure a way to get the broad traps into the tunnel without the whole thing collapsing as I dug it out to make it fit.
It worked! Against all odds the gophers were coming out of the ground in broad daylight and throwing themselves into the rat traps to get at the gum!!! In 2 weeks we caught 13 gophers. One day we caught 2 gophers in the same trap in about 1 hour. I saw there was a gopher in one of the rat traps and asked my husband to remove it. He went to the store and when he came back I had noticed there was still a gopher in the trap and asked him why he had left it there, but he had already removed one and this was a new gopher!
We must have made a dent in the population, as we saw only a few new tunnels after that. The technique was also limited by the short time in spring during which the tunnels are open. Since then our cats have been able to keep them from getting quite as out of hand as they were that year.
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Resources:
We have friends who swear by "Black Hole" and "Black Box" gopher traps as well. Here is information on a variety of Gopher traps and how to choose.
For beautiful, durable and easy to assemble raised bed kits,(illustrated above) see: naturalyards.com
For natural outdoor yard and garden pests: Bird&Home.com
Natural Home and garden pest solutions: www.NaturalPestProductsStore.com
Source for traps for Gophers, moles and voles is www.traplineproducts.com. They also have instructional videos.
2 comments:
A friend reports that his garden has been invaded by voles. Tiny carnivorous rodents that don't harm your plants but will attack (and thus repel) gophers! His gopher population left for safer places... Anyone else know about this?
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