On no! Please let us know when you get a few of them. I am so pleased to find someone rejuving their rose beds.

I have no personal Vole experience. But I found an article about Vole Control on about.com. Hope it helps :)

Here is a link that might be useful: Vole Control

I will give this bit of advice. Beware of using poison bait. We loaded the tunnels outside our fenced in yard once with poison bait and the voles carried the poison bait back into our yard where our pets roam... Luckily I counted and wrote down each location they were placed so I could retrieve them all... Almost a diseaster for us!

I ended up using traps to kill them which worked out ok. I watched a video on Youtube on the subject...

I plant in hardware cloth cages now. That completely works, but replanting established roses is a pain, of course. Good luck!

I'm sorry, but sticky traps are so inhumane; I hope you find some other way to solve your problem.

When voles are in my house, running around my bedroom and going in my bird's cage to get her seed, my main concern is not treating the voles humanely.I thought they were just brown mice, til my rose roots started getting eaten and I looked up voles on the internet. Indeed, another name for them is field mice. But they are voles, and apparently propagate like crazy.

Thank you Jim, I do have a dog, so have been hesitant to try any poison baits. And thanks to those of you offered some aid. I'll look at YouTube some more, though I did do some searching there last night. Has anyone tried the castor oil treatment? I bought a container of mole/vole repellent and the main ingredient is castor oil, which I've read that voles dislike.

I have had reports of folks in NJ using poison, traps, moth balls to repel the voles, putting chewing gum in the holes, and putting a hose in the runs to flush out the critters, all with varying degrees of success. I'll post a note on the Jersey Shore RS's Facebook page to see if there are other opinions.

Meredith_e mentioned hardware cloth. You have to use these for planting if you have a vole problem. The method is to get the "cloth" (actually metal mesh) from the hardware store, cut a section to line the planting hole, making a sort of container, and plant the rose in the lined hole. Good luck, there is no easy solution.

Voles are almost as bad as deer, IMO. They eat the roots of fruit trees, roses, and many perennials (probably). It is so incredibly disheartening.

It really is awful. Mine are the type that might not run around above ground, but they do use mole tunnels. I have both moles and voles, and so the tunneling is extensive. If you see holes in the ground that are like a quarter in diameter, those are the vole holes.

I use 1/2 inch-spaced hardware cloth and cut it with straight-tipped "tin snip" metal cutters that look a bit like scissors. I'm really fast and good at making the baskets now :) It works wonderfully. I've seen holes where they tried to go in from below and couldn't do it, or where they changed their mind if they went in the top. When they hit the metal, they change course either way.

I did have to dig up all of my established roses when the voles found the roses. I was losing too many, so fast!

There is a bait that does not cause the same damage to dogs, etc, but it would hurt squirrels and smaller rodents that ate it. I bought some once but was still too afraid to use it. I just have so much wildlife here that I didn't risk it. The baskets work the best anyway, so that's how I handle it now. And I encourage the snakes that the neighbors had practically killed off. That'll help :D :D