I have the same problem as you with having cats... coyote food. As to garlic.... one year, as fate would have it, I ended up planting several hundred garlics all over the gardens. They all grew so well that I thought I would have garlic into my old age. One day I noticed a particularly nice specimen... leaning. Upon further inspection I found that the leaning top was all that was left of the garlic plant.... eaten from the root up. Slowly but surely every garlic plant... leaned. Now, I plant garlic in pots... just like all my other food plants. The Iris bed is 8" deep on top of hardware cloth and it sticks up out of the ground another 4". ANything not a Salvia/Sage gets planted in an underground wire cage. PS: writing in all caps is considered to be yelling on forums... or super emphatic.

I can completely understand your frustration. Rodents are territorial and you kill one (or some) the new guys will just move in to take over. For some unknown reasons our front yard is now rodent free. I managed to trap a pair at a time and after the last pair I refilled the holes then plugged them will rocks. I returned to inspect the area and checked for new holes and tracks periodically. It's been two years and I've found none. The pocket gopher that drove me crazy was a loner. I trapped and killed it and the rest of the season we're gopher free. I know a new guy will come in to take over the place so I stopped planting anything for two years. I hope by leaving the place deserted will drive the rest of them looking resident somewhere else and eventually there's no more gopher scent to attract them back. If they do return I have two black boxes to take care of them. I still have one more rodent headache, the biggest yet, to deal with - the backyard gang. We have a large composter in our backyard (just a fence away from the back land) and I used to trap them and got one or two a day. The dead bodies got smaller in size each day indicating the young ones had to come out to look for food. Activities would stop for a while then the whole cycle started over again with large mice then the small ones trapped near the composter. I know as long as the food is there they will never stop yet I don't have a solution.

Berndoodle, you struck a nerve. Those darn gophers! I watched a whole chrysanthemum plant vanish before my eyes last week (right before annual bloom season). The gophers just pulled it under in broad daylight. I, like you, have a location where the population is huge in a vast area. I am trying something new this year with my beardeds since I do not have a huge collection yet (maybe never if the gophers continue to invite their family & friends to my place). I will be planting them in clay pots, submerged, rim level to the ground. I am concerned about the hole in the bottom of the pot...don't know if they can sqeeze through. I know the plants won't have a lot of room to spread. I'll just divide them again next year.

I let my dogs out for one last late night potty stop, and they didn't come when I called them (rare at night, since they usually come in expecting another treat - sometimes they go out just to get the treat when they come in...), so I left them for a few minutes. When they didn't come beating on the door, I went to check to make sure they hadn't escaped the fence or something. My young one was on the deck, but my older one was out in the yard, and wouldn't come when called. Soooo, at 1:30 in the morning, I go trekking toward her with the flashlight, and after about 15 minutes of trying to get her to drop the dead thing in her mouth (apparently treats are more appealing than dead rodent creatures...)I'm left with something... I have never seen a live vole. When we were in AK, I think I saw a few dead ones (cats or dogs...)since I could only find info on 2 critters that may have been in my yard, and I had already figured out what the tiny shrews were (the critters liked to play with them, usually they made it out alive)I assumed the others were voles. This thing I think was longer and not as fat looking as the things in AK, but was brown, probably 4" long or so, had little out-turned feet like moles have and a little (1" or so) bald looking tail (like a really short rat tail). Didn't have a long nose like moles or shrews. Probably slightly squished, and very much covered in dog slobber. Would this be a vole? I don't know what all lives around here (outside COS) other than rabbits. She must have caught it off-guard, or they are slow, since this is a 6 year old Lab/hound/shepherd mix with bad hips, some pain in her leg from a break when she was a puppy, and she has Addison's disease to boot. It's possible that the young one caught it, and she stole it, but he has no history of catching critters. She does, it's just been a while... Of course, the DH is asleep, so once again, I have dead critter duty.