Watermelons! I never would have thought they could bother those. I am surprised they aren't eating your wife's tomatoes. Maybe the hot peppers being next to the tomatoes is deterring them. I did try making a garlic and hot pepper solution that I sprayed on the onions and soil. I think it worked for a day or two, but after that the voles were back at the onions. They are eating my onions, potatoes, and asparagus. I expect they will get into the sweet potatoes too. I never expected anything to want to eat the onions, that one surprised me!

Thanks for the link, informative thread. Gravel in the hole- I will have to do that,great idea. I am so sorry about your garden. Where are you located? maybe I can help you out with some replacements. So what about mulch in general? I could cry, I have been putting down leaf mulch on all my perrenial beds on the advice of an organic gardener I know. So I probably laid out the welcome mat by doing that? Here is a post I had on another board re: the critter "Something fairly small is tunneling under my soil, and eating plants roots. It is not a woodchuck- the tunnel is WAY too small for that, and when we had one he only ate the tops of plants. Here is a typical occurance Day 1 - oh look at the pretty flower! day 2 - hmmm, that flower looks like it is wilting, and is leaning at a wierd angle. ~go over to flower, and realize it is now just a stem in a hole with no roots It only eats certain things, it unfortunately loves delphiniums but doesn't touch other things around them - my peonies, iris, daylilies - all very close by- are fine. It only eats the roots, and from the top the plant looks fine - all leaves and flowers stay intact, but start to wilt, and that is when I notice. The tunnels are about 2"-3" across. I saw a mole (i think) once in the yard about 2 years ago- could that be it?

Never had this much activity from voles. Might be the dry Spring we had - our property is wooded behind our huge backyard which is often VERY wet and this year it's dry and the vole tunnels seem to be everywhere. They aren't eating the plants but go right for the rows of peas, beans, radishes, beets where the soil is soft and moist, also pushing up tomato and pepper plants. I mash the tunnels down with my foot and they just push them back up again. So I tried ripping out the tunnels with my bare hands. They'd dig UNDER the trench! Sometimes the hole would go so deep, I'd have to dig it up with the shovel. Even WHILE I'm ripping out and digging in the garden, I'll turn around and see they'd pushed up what I'd just pushed down. I thought, I bet if I just wait and watch, I'll see movement. Sure enough, within about 2 minutes I see the soil moving. Poised over the quivering mound with my spade, bring it down hard several times. Nothing. Go in the house for lunch. Come out and it had repaired the burrow where I'd just tried to kill it! So I wait and watch again. Sure enough ... soil moving, get down on my hands and knees, hand poised ready to plunge and grab the little b@stard ... a dime sized hole falls open and poof! Gone. Didn't return. My husband comes out there and looks at all the mess I'd made and said, "Did you ever see that movie, Caddy Shack?" No. There are still tunnels and we've tried mouse traps and those didn't work. Bought poison but after reading the instructions, decided to use as a LAST resort. So, I've been using a combination of techniques/substances. Human urine, castor oil, sour milk, ammonia, dog turds, blocking the tunnels with a barrier (heavy plastic pieces) and still pushing down or ripping up the tunnels. If I can just keep them out of my garden, we can buckle down and try to get the population under control this winter when they are more vulnerable. We had a mild winter last season and I think that's also responsible for the population bloom. Flooding isn't an option as we try our best to conserve water. I don't know if predatory animals would be effective - day or night because I've never even seen one. Perhaps a terrier that could sniff one out and dig it up. My Lab has no interest, or even awareness of them.

Definitely could be a vole. And if there is one, there's a village. I don't know how you feel about exterminating these critters but removing them in some fashion is probably going to be necessary. They can do an amazing amount of damage and while like most toddlers, broccoli is not tops on their list of favorite snacks, when they're hungry they'll eat anything. And if you think rabbits are prolific, they have nothing on voles. Voles don't hibernate so you will need to take some precautions for the winter or you'll find things like your clematis, small trees and shrubs, and late and very early perennials chewed and destroyed. We wrap chicken wire around things we want to protect, making a cylinder that is about 6 inches away from the trunk or shrub all the way around. Even with that, it's more of an irritant for them than any real protection, but stuffed with salt marsh hay, it protects our most vulnerable plants from the drying winter winds we deal with here on the coast. Our best weapon was our cat, who did a fine job of pest control until she died a couple of years ago. Fences only make it harder for them. They can tunnel as deeply as you can bury chicken wire, although we did find that it was just enough of a deterrent to give our cat a chance to go into attack mode. After the cat died two years ago, I felt like I was fighting a losing battle until one of our Cavalier King Charles Spaniels took up where our late cat left off. At 17 pounds and neurologically impaired to boot, it's amazing to see this pup in action. He has single handledly eradicated the moles, voles, chipmunks, and woodchucks. I wish you luck. Last summer, the woodchucks and voles ate our entire vegetable bed to the ground and began using the perennial beds as their personal buffet before Spencer (AKA Tough Nut) found his mojo and went on the offensive with them. This year, our veggies are mostly on the deck but the yarrow and coneflowers and other perennials show no signs of rodent damage and the number of prey he is catching has dwindled dramatically from several a day to one or two a month. A cat or a rat terrier or small spaniel might be your best weapon if poisoning or trapping isn't something you want to do.