Mountain Musings on Garden Predators

Mountain Musings – A guest column by Dottie Simmons who lives in eastern Humboldt County describes life at her rural homestead:

It’s been an exceptionally warm spring, grass is growing inches a day, everything is blooming, and our garden starts are coming along. For a plant-a-holic like myself everyday is a temptation to get something in the ground, start some seeds, or prep a space for when the time is right… and begin to defend our garden from the many critters that are waiting to feast on our plants.

We have two greenhouses for year round gardening and raised beds for other early and overwintering plants. This gives us the drainage needed and slight protection to get us through the colder wet seasons.

But neither protects us from rodents or bugs.

It used to be – and likely still is – a thing that any conversation amongst Humboldt gardeners ultimately ends up on gophers. I have often said they are the only thing between me and being a Buddhist, but I must add ground squirrels to that list.

Last year’s pea planting – and what I hope to do soon!

I have pea starts more than ready to go into our lower greenhouse where trellises await them.

Naked Broccoli – convenient snack bar for the ground squirrel tunnel right below.

When we went to weed and prepare the bed we found something had eaten the winter broccoli plant leaves all the way to the top… AND had a new condo right in the raised bed!  Grrrr!

We raised the trellis wire and placed a squirrel trap in the bed, and after a day or two caught and disposed of a ground squirrel. Luckily there are currently only a few here, we believe due to our plentiful fox and bobcat population. But it only takes one and there are years they are more of an issue than others.

Squirrel trap set and ready…

Once we had a squirrel boom and they undermined the concrete pad our 250 gallon propane tank sits on. We go out in the morning and one end of the tank is sticking up in the air!  A couple hundred + dollars later the propane company had repaired the area, replaced the pad and reset the tank. Common occurrence, they told us!

Meanwhile the pea starts still wait as we want to make sure we have the last of the resident squirrels taken care of and we are still catching mice.

“Magic Mouse Box” An effective method making a ‘safe’ cave with 2 entrances and a hinged lid. Place one entrance along a wall where mice travel. They will jump over the 1st trap, so we always have 3 or 4 in the box.

Up in the garden proper some new strawberry plants are in the same holding pattern, as we have gopher traps and a Magic Mouse Box set for the critters that dug a tunnel in the new soil of the bed. I am afraid even good hardware cloth only lasts so long before there are openings into the raised beds.

In the main garden we always plant extra so we can (unwillingly) share with these critters, but being vigilant and setting traps is never ending. We do not use poison as we have cats and dogs who could eat a poisoned rodent, not to mention wild predators.

Our greatest success in gopher trapping happened back in the 1990s. We were being devastated in the garden by the voracious rodents. I literally had done tug of war with a gopher and a pea vine on occasion! We had set the standard gopher traps repeatedly only to have them set them off with dirt without being caught.

We got the gopher before he got the cabbage! Our current favorite trap is the Gopher Hawk. [Photo from a previous year]

I had heard a few times about putting Juicy Fruit Gum in their tunnels. That they would eat the gum, it would block up their intestines, and they would perish. It sounded pretty iffy. But then one day we saw a Herb Caen column in the S.F. Chronicle where he mentioned folks in the Bay Area having success doing the same thing! Well! If it made it to Herb Caen’s column we hd to give it a try.

So we bought some gum, unwrapped it and placed a stick at the mouth of several gopher tunnels. It disappeared. Success, we thought, and repeated the procedure until we had likely gone through a case of the stuff! They were enjoying the gum but apparently not dying.

There is no easy way to bait a regular gopher trap, so as it was early spring when their tunnels are open to the surface, we bought some rat traps, baited them with the gum and left them by the openings. We caught 13 gophers in just a few days! We caught 2 gophers in the same trap in 1 hour!!! We actually thinned their population enough we had a successful garden harvest.

Sadly I think they changed the recipe for the gum. Anymore we have not had any luck with that method. Luckily neither have we ever had such an infestation of gophers again and traps still do the job.

Happy gardening!