My experience mirrors Lone Jack's. While it seemed initially successful, the little devils were back in no time. Having to treat every week or two gets expensive over the long term and is not 100% effective.

I do not think the castor oil harms vegetable crops, but I still wouldn't use it around root crops just to be safe. It isn't that I think it would be harmful to you if you eat those veggies, but rather that I wouldn't want to at root veggies that had an oil product of any kind in their growing soil.

When you have soil-dwelling pests like moles and gophers, understand that nothing you do ever will make them go completely away. No matter how many you kill, more will move in eventually, sometimes quickly, sometimes not for a few months or a year or more. The strategy you use to thwart them must be carried out with that knowledge.

Some cats will kill them for you. Other cats will look at them, sigh, and curl up in a ball in the sun or shade to take a good nap. So, while a cat or even a small dog like a rat terrier might help you control them, their efforts will be sporadic.

If you have moles, while they are annoying, they do not necessarily harm your plants in a direct manner by eating them. They eat grubs, earthworms and other insects, but can tear up your plantings while tunneling around looking for food. They also can harm plant roots by scraping soil away from the roots while looking for insects.

If you have gophers, they will devour almost everything you plant. I've never had them eat daffodils, and some gardeners plant a dense border of daffodils around their gardens to try to repel the gophers. I do not think it is as effective as some people believe it is, but it is worth a shot. Otherwise, gophers eat most any and all plants, including tubers, bulbs, etc. They will devour your onions, carrots, potatoes, sun chokes, etc.

If you have gophers and moles, you might have voles as well. They are short, stubby rodents that look sort of like hamsters. The kind we have at our house are pine voles that inhabit the woods and come to the garden on picnicking expeditions and to throw wild parties where they nibble on every potato in the ground, going from one, eating a little and moving on to the next one. Voles will travel through the mole runs so that you don't see them above ground all that often, and they tunnel on their own as well. Cats and traps are the best way to attempt to control them but they breed like....well, rats or mice, so they can breed faster than you can kill them all.

In our yard and garden, the cats have been pretty helpful. They have completely wiped out the moles. They generally wipe out the gophers, though it takes them longer to do it. A young male cat who is a great hunter will stay after the gophers though and either kill them all or drive them away. The voles are a different story. No matter how many the cats kill, they just keep coming due to their prolific breeding rates.

In our garden, the best way I have found to grow root crops is to build tall raised beds lined with 1/4" hardware cloth on the bottom. We nail or staple the hardware cloth to the wooden planks used to build the raised beds. For root crops, we build the hardware cloth-lined raised beds 16" above grade level to give the potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, turnips, etc. lots of growing space. We grow most other crops in raised beds only a few inches above grade level, but these beds are not lined with hardware cloth. Generally the voles do not bother tomatoes, peppers,sweet corn, cucumbers and most other non-root crops in our front garden, which mostly has red clay soil that has been well-amended. In the back garden which sits pretty far behind the house and is in an area with sandy-silty soil, the voles are an on-and-off problem. Some years they don't bother much of anything, but in the hottest, driest years, they devour everything. I mean everything. Herbs, flowers, fruit tree roots, veggie plants, you name it and they eat it. They do not eat four o'clock tubers or crinum lily roots, and so far they haven't bothered daylilies or daffodils, but they will eat most other bulbs, corms and tubers...like lilies and dahlias, for example.

Until you begin gardening, you won't really know how much these little voles are going to bother your plants. You may find they are a worse problem than you ever imagined. You may find they are not as bad as expected. We moved here in 1999 and didn't have too much trouble with them at all until around 2010 or 2011. We've had tons of trouble with the voles ever since. Often, when we have a big mast (acorn) crop in OK one year, as we did in 2016, there is a huge population explosion of the voles the following year. I believe that the parents fatten up on acorns all winter and then breed like crazy. The huge population moves into your garden when the weather gets hot and devours everything.

Any product that claims to repel them likely is a waste of money. Focus instead on killing them or in excluding them. I've heard of people renting trenchers, cutting a trench a foot or more deep around their garden plot, and sinking hardware cloth into that trench to keep the little beasts from tunneling under the garden fence. I have no idea if it would work for you. I haven't tried it here. If you choose to do that, remember to call the proper authorities and get all buried water lines, sewer lines, gas lines, electric lines, etc. marked before you dig anything at all for safety reason....and because it is the law. In Oklahoma, it is called Call Okie 811, I think. Let me find info on it and link it.

Okie811

With everything you do to combat moles, voles and gophers, it is most important to do the work up front. It is whole lot easier to do the necessary work to exclude them as much as possible from your plantings up front before you plant anything. It is a lot harder to deal with them afterwards. Had we had trouble with the voles in the beginning, then every raised bed we built would have been lined with hardware cloth to exclude them, but we had almost a decade of garden building here before they became a problem. We've only gone back and lined a few raised beds to keep the voles out. I doubt we'll ever do all the raised beds. At this point, being a lot older than when we first moved here, we have no desire to tear apart the beds we have, remove all the soil, put down the hardware cloth and refill the beds. It makes my back ache just thinking about it.

We usually have gopher and vole problems the worst at two specific times---in very early Spring when they are extra hungry for anything at the same time you are putting new plants in the ground. And, later on, in summer when the big heat arrives and the rain stops falling and everything gets pathetically dry. They flee the woods and come to the garden to devour everything in sight, including plants they don't bother any other time.

In order to grow some things (dahlias, lilies and rhubarb, for example), I grow those only in containers raised up about 2' above the ground (to keep the varmints from jumping up into the containers). It isn't ideal as it is a lot of work and buying and filling up that many containers is a lot of work, but it does work insofar as it keeps the voles and gophers from eating those plants. Be sure your container's drainage holes are small enough that the voles and gophers cannot come up into the containers through the drainage holes, or line the bottoms of the containers with 1/4" hardware cloth. Don't bother with 1/2" inch hardware cloth as some young rodents can get through those 1/2" openings.

There are recipes online using castor Oil/water with a hose end sprayer. The trick to its effectiveness is spraying every two weeks. But even then, not a forever solution. They might go away for 6 months then wham! The tunnels. Start spraying again. Castor oil at WM pharmacy much cheaper than the granules at HD/Lowe's. Won't hurt plants but if I remember correctly, you want to spray the soil, which is what they dig

Following. We haven't figured out what it is that is tunneling.

ok, i think i have had an idea. tell me if it is crazy. why fight the moles for the best soil if I am going to build raised beds? why not put my garden smack dab in the middle of the clay? I am thinking dig down about a foot and lay down some old logs (hugelkultur style) and then cover the logs with soil and then build the raised beds (with the hardware cloth for safety) and fill them with lots of good soil and organic material. will this work?

Of course you can build your garden beds wherever it suits you and there's nothing wrong with building below-ground hugelkultur beds that have hardware cloth-lined beds above them. That is exactly what I want to do with our back garden because of its sandy soil/vole population, but it is more on my "one of these days" list and not on my list to do this year due to the massive amount of work involved, and the fact that we still haven't even got all the beds in our front garden built yet. We started out with a handful of raised beds in the front garden 1999, and we have added about one per year or sometimes every other year since then. Since the front garden is a large garden, I feel like we'll never really finish building all the raised beds that it needs, much less then turn around and do the same thing to the back garden. Unfortunately, our best bed-building time is in winter and we are volunteer firefighters and winter fire season is our busiest fire season, so it seems like every single time we have a plan to build a new raised bed in the front garden, we end up spending that weekend fighting fires instead. So, the back garden limps along with no raised beds, plenty of voles and lots of suspense about how many plants the voles will eat and when they'll start. To be fair to the voles, they often don't bother the back garden plants until it gets hot and dry in summer, so I can make the best use of the back garden by planting cool-season crops and my early corn back there. Then, at least, we get something before the voles begin devouring everything. And, some years they don't bother the plants at all, but you cannot count on that.

If you can dig deeply enough in your clay to build hugelkultur beds below the surface, then it is not nearly as compacted and dense as our clay was when we started. That's a good thing. You couldn't penetrate our clay 2", not even with a strong, heavy-duty rear-tine tiller, a mattock, or a pickax. Now, after all these years of amending it is pretty easy to dig down about 15-18" in that garden, which is a huge improvement but it has taken a long time to get to that point, and at the southernmost end of the garden, you can only dig down about a foot, but that was the last area to get amended and the last (so far) to get raised beds built above amended clay.

Be sure the garden has a nearby water source to make irrigation, when necessary, easy to acomplish. And, of course, you're going to continue to have those moles, voles, gophers or any combination thereof tunneling through the good soil. So, if the good soil is intended to be a lawn, you still have to fight the little beasts or your lawn will be torn up and unsightly.

On the other hand, all you have to do is visit farm land or ranch land torn up by feral hogs one time, and you'll be shocked, horrified and then very happy to go back to your place where your problem is only moles, voles, gophers and, if you're in some parts of NE OK, ground hogs.

...or east TX

I spent most of today reading about vole control. And gophers. And ground hogs. I'm beginning to conclude that well-placed poison (anti-coagulating) is one of the few viable options for us. Since our soil is so extremely rocky, digging any trenches is quite impossible; if we don't mulch, well, then the plants will likely not make it through the summer heat--not to mention the soil needs improving, as well. Trapping with mouse traps made us laugh--many many traps set over an acre? Uh, probably not. If we embarked on the poison path, we'd have to be exceedingly careful, as our cat and dog roam the yard. However--the dog doesn't go into the flower beds, and I've only seen the cat in one of them. Also, I'm thinking just as folks are encouraged to place containers over the traps near the voles' holes, as they don't like to come out into the open, we might place containers over the holes when we place the poison bait in them, too. Those are my musings from today's reading. What do you think? Yes, Dawn, my husband was telling me all about feral hogs. I'm thankful we don't have them here (in the northeast)--and yes we do have ground hogs (woodchucks). They're not too difficult to deal with--and they're big enough to shoot! Our dog has had a couple encounters with one who lived not far away from our property line--they're feisty and not afraid to fight, but in the end would be no match for the dog. (We had to call the dog off one he was chasing and being chased by, until the woodchuck bit him, then the dog was ready to kill--but the neighbor lady felt so bad she asked us to not kill it--so we called Titan off.) Well, I'm not sure if we have gophers or not--frankly, I've never see a gopher. We thought the damage to your yard last summer was by armadillos--and it may have been, as whatever it was had mussed up all the straw mulch in rather sizable heaps here and there--and there were many little 2" roundish divots an inch or two deep in the lawn, but didn't notice any plant damage associated with that mess. But then some of the plants began dying--some being eaten (rabbits, I was thinking). But with the cat having just caught two voles in a week just now, I am a little freaked and will be watching carefully, with a supply of poison at hand.

We also have a glut of possums, and the dog HATES possums--he corners them after it gets dark, and alerts us by barking and growling--and the possum is always growling and hissing right back at him. We had read that possums were beneficial because of the ticks they consume--on the other hand, if they come into the yard, the truce is over.

bossyvossy, Well then east Texans have my sympathy. Groundhogs are a huge PITA.

Nancy, The problem with groundhogs is that sometimes you only discover you have them after they've gotten into the garden and eaten a lot of stuff. My husband grew up in groundhog country (Pennsylania) where seeing dead groundhogs on the side of all the roads is as common there as seeing dead armadillos alongside roadways in Texas and Oklahoma.

We have cats and dogs that are outside during the day, but locked up safely indoors at night while the wild things roam, so using poison is not a viable option for us. We have used it inside our large detached garage in the winter to kill rodents that try to move into the structure to survive the winter, and we have to be extra, extra careful to keep the garage doors closed at all times so our cats and dogs won't go in there. I am good at keeping doors closed, but DH and DS are not. I'd never use it outdoors. Putting a bucket over it with the wind we have, free-range chickens and roaming wildlife? I suspect the bucket would be virtually worthless.

Possums are our friends. We try not to harm them. They eat venomous snakes so they're always welcome at our place. Most of our neighbors, because they have horses that can be sickened and killed by a protozoa carried by possums that causes a form of equine encephalitis, do kill possums. Our woodland acres probably are a possum haven since no one shoots them here. Most of the farmland in our county is no longer farmland, with most farms having been converted over to horse ranches or cattle ranches, and those horse ranchers (rightfully so) cannot afford to tolerate possums.

Dawn

Thanks. Well now we have to worry about the ground hogs too! Wow. We try to get the dog to stop fighting with the possums, but he really just hates em. I think most of them are giving him a wide berth now, as we didn't see as many in our yard last year. I got a big kick out of him feuding with the ground hog, though, and we will keep our eyes out for them, too. Oh well, perhaps the lesson here is just to plant lots and lots of stuff, and try it various places in the yard. I'll rethink the poison and see if I can come up with maybe some combination of deterrents. I laughed at the pitchfork idea. . . sounds like a good way to relieve frustrations. And could see one of us doing that. . . especially me.

UPDATE: Husband bought a trap on amazon and has had success. Two gophers down, ??? to go. The funny thing developing is the sheer joy my husband experiences when get gets one of the little devils. He is giddy.

I am thinking he has likely won a few battles but not the war. As they construct a large neighborhood to the north of us, they are driving all kinds of critters our way. Only a matter of time before something else takes its place.

Congrats on the success. Here where I live, if you have gophers on your property and you live on acreage, it is likely to be hundreds of them, or at last dozens (more on really sandy soil, less on sandy-clayey or somewhat rocky soil). Thus, the battle is never-ending. Every victory should be celebrated though, as that is one less gopher that will be procreating and making more gophers.

We had a wildlife invasion when a neighbor hired someone with a backhoe to remove about 95% of the trees off his ranch. There were a ton of trees on a large ranch. The wild things had to go somewhere. Many of them came here. We were wildly overrun with huge populations of everything---including possums, skunks, coons, deer, rabbits and armadillos. After a few years, the population leveled out to only what our property could support, with a little assist from us in the coon and skunk department.

I always thought gophers were the worst non-venomous pesky critter. Then I walked on several different properties overrun by feral hogs and learned just how wrong I was. The holes made by those hogs foraging literally take over and ruin every square foot of space. You cannot even walk through the area without stepping in the holes and risking a twisted or broken ankle. You can trap and kill the hogs, or you can shoot them on sight, but they are reproducing faster than anyone I know here has managed to kill them. So, when I see a mole, gopher or vole hole, run or mound, my first reaction always is "well, at least we don't have hogs". Actually, we occasionally have hogs in our creeks or at the very back of the property line where they seem to travel the deer trails, but we don't have them up on the higher ground around the house, garden and yard, for which I am grateful.