First of all you need to determine if you have Moles or Voles - Moles eat bugs and worms, Voles eat plants. They are both small and furry and pretty much spend all the time under ground (often using the same burrows). Getting rid of them is all out war and can take up a great deal of time. But first you need to determine which one you have. Any plant damage??

Funny story,

I was a young kid and we had a mole in the garden. All the locals had the craziest suggestions of course.

"There's only one way to get rid of a mole" said my Grandfather.
You have to sit outside all night with a shotgun and when he pops his head up out of the hole, KABOOM.

So, there I was out in the dark with a shotgun and a flashlight taped to the barrel waiting for the mole to appear.
Finally, he pops his head up and ..............funny thing is I never fired a shotgun before. KABOOM, flew backwards 10 feet and blew all the apples out of the tree. KABOOM again, straight through the garden hose.
Well of course the Mole is now gone and the police sirens are wailing and theres a flood in the garden from the peppered hose.
Quickly I headed into the garage and hid out until it was all clear, which seemd like an eternity.

Never did see the mole again, probably frightened it to death.

Nowadays I put hot peppers down the mole holes to keep them away, while I enjoy eating the apples off the tree :)

Termater

The remedies for them are as different as their diets (voles are generally smaller, by the way, and are rodents, essentially a type of mouse -- moles aren't even in the rodent family, or so I've read).

Anyway, Moles will often create tunnels digging for worms and grubs (if you have a large Japanese beetle problem, they may be taking care of that for you, underground, but they also love earthworms, which we all know are the gardener's best friend). The FIRST THING they taught us in Master Gardener class was how to kill moles (the class "mentor" is apparently a real "mole-hater," and he did a slide-show in an intro session a month before the first class, wherein someone signed up of the PETA persuasion promptly protested, quit the program and asked for a refund, lol).

If it's moles, they'll be active in the daytime, and you'll see them moving the ground as they tunnel. If you can actually see one tunnelling, one thing that works (I once saw my dad do this as a kid) is to walk up to where the head of the tunnel is, where the mole is actively digging, with a shovel, and whomp down HARD with the shovel, flat onto the ground, right where the leading edge of the tunnel is, thus basically rattling Mr. Mole's brains and causing instant death.

If not, you determine where an "active run is" (they have instructions for doing this with the trap you'll need to buy), place a harpoon trap over that active run, and the next time Mr. Mole comes through there, he gets harpooned.

If you can determine where voles are active, you can expose part of their run (they sometimes don't dig tunnels at all, just kind of create "runs" under mulch or loose earth), set a mousetrap in there with a bit of apple and peanut butter on the trigger, and most importantly, cover that back over TIGHTLY with a bucket, or something, so that NO LIGHT gets in, as most underground voles like total darkness and won't go anywhere they see light.

That's another point... There are two common types of vole in the Carolinas: Pine voles and meadow voles. The pine voles are the underground kind; meadow voles are essentially like field mice. While pine voles will eat the roots of your precious plants and the bulbs of all your flowers, the meadow voles can do something even MORE insidious and attrocious -- they can and sometimes WILL chew off all the bark around the base of a small tree up as high as they can reach, thus girdling it and killing the tree. If you've spent $50 or $100 or so for a Japanese maple or Prunus mume, or similar, and gotten it "just so," and a little mouse comes along and kills it by eating a a little chunk of bark from around its base, well, I don't know about you, but I'd be wanting to kill every rodent I could find!

Good luck with whatever it is you have, Crazy4Life!
Jeff

Also keep in mind that squirrels are busy digging small craters in yards at this time of year so if your damage looks more like pok marks and not like tunnels then it could the work of hungry squirrels.

I had a few moles in my yard but have since got a terrier mix, so now the moles are gone. I now spend my time filling in the holes that she dug to get rid of the moles. Use caution, sometimes the treatment is worse then the disease.

Now I think she just pretends that she is helping so that she can dig

I started using milky spore on the yard and in the garden. I hven't seen any grubs in the garden since. If they are moles, get rid of their food and they will go next door to your neighbors house. You could of course get a cat, they work well too.

At the end of last summer as I was mowing my lawn a mole ran out of my lawn on to the street. Now I have never seen any mole holes or any mole damage anywhere on my property. Is it possible he was just passing through my yard to get to the empty lot accross the street? Or maybe I am blind to their damage (aren't moles almost blind?).

I also think there is something wrong because even though there are woods behind my house I have never seen a squirrel around any of the trees. Maybe my house was built on a toxic waste dump or something.