A gopher rant. Feel free to add your own pest rants.

I almost cried this morning and I'm not generally a weepy person.

Last year I planted about 250ft2 of potatoes. I harvested about 10 gallons. The gophers got the rest. I was ridiculously busy with work last year, so potatoes were about the only thing I planted. I sighed and said, "Well, it's just a bad gopher year."

Last year I was so fed up with being too busy to plant a garden that I quit my job and started my own business so I could manage my time the way I want. That's how much I want to grow food.

So this year, I had lots of time, planted lots of stuff, actually had cooperative weather for the first time in forever, and now everything is growing amazingly well. Enter gophers.

They ate whatever elephant garlic they didn't get to last fall and have been aggressively thinning my chive and walking onion patches. Apparently they really like salad burnet, cause all my plants are gone, in four different gardens. I have so many pansies everywhere that I don't notice the loss so much, but they seem to love those, too.  Yesterday I found a hole in my sunchoke bed, so I guess they're wiping those out.  The only potatoes I planted are from seed, and I have those in big pots to protect them. I have potato volunteers in most of my gardens now, though. I assume they're being surreptitiously munched on , just like last year. They ate 20ft of snap peas, everything I planted. So far the peppers in the hoop house are okay, but there's a lot of fresh gopher mounds in there, so it's just a matter of time. They've been popping up in my grain beds (only the new varieties that I only planted a tiny amount of, of course) and pulling stalks down into their tunnels. They've only got one squash plant so far, and tomatoes and tomatillos haven't been hit yet. I expect losses any second. One year they dragged a whole 5 x 3' tomato plant down their tunnels in one night. I won't even get into all the fruit trees and bushes they've killed over the years.

So this morning, my 4 x 8' bed of landrace tepary beans, which I was trying out for the first time and had high hopes for, was completely gone. I thought a deer must have eaten them cause there were no holes anywhere. Then I poked into the bed. There's a tunnel running underneath every row, and the gophers were just pulling the plants down into the tunnels by the roots. I fucking hate them.

So, apparently, the gophers want me to live on rye, wild arugula and broccoli raab, daylilies, and whatever walking onions they deign to leave me. Yum. Well, I guess I can season it all with oregano. They let me eat that, too. 🙄

Rant over.

Who's wrecking your garden?

Hi Jan,

I hate gophers. What makes me feel helpless is the fact that they spent most time of their life underground and I have not found an efficient way to kill them.
I don't want to use poison - I have a bottle from TS but decided not to.
I have stainless traps that need ridiculous amount of work: find a fresh tunnel, dig gently, place it with a bait in the corridor, etc nonsense.
I have already lost around 15 fruit trees. You come one day and see wilting leaves. You thin naively first that it's because of lack of water. You water more. In few next days you pick entire trunk separated from the root.
My best solution so far:
1. Plant all fruit trees in wire cage with 0.5x0.5" openings. Regular chicken wire with 1x1" is useless.
2. Leave some native plants around the trees or other plants.
3. Own two cats that were only eating raw meat in their entire lives and are ferocious rodent killers and eaters.

When I have a chance I kill them with pellet gun when they occasionally emerge, but I get a chance to do it twice per year only.

Hi Jan,
I'm not sure if you will take this as good news or as bad news. But according to all the so called experts online.... gophers are very solitary creatures. They generally stake out a territory and don't interact with another gopher except to mate. So all those many holes you see are probably just from 1 or 2 animals, each in it's own little spaces.  

I've been in your shoes before and watched them pull down entire rows of peas and beans and lots of other stuff just like you have. And I cried too! I tried all the silly ideas online that didn't work, short of building Fort Knox out of hardware cloth. But then I learned it is very easy to trap them. I used to get 3-4 a year and now I just see one.... maybe every 2 years. I can usually get rid of it in just 2 to 3 days. It's not hard at all.

I've noticed a few people here that have had the same problem and they can't bring themselves to trap them. They just continue to suffer. But I'll tell you I'm pretty old and if I can do it so can pretty much anyone. It's sad but it's not gory  or anything. And I can honestly say that I believe the 'experts' are correct. It was always just one lonely gopher doing all the damage each time.

I would just go to a fresh, new hole and dig a slightly bigger one there, about 12” deep and 12” in diameter to locate his/her tunnel underground. Sometimes I'd find 2 tunnels, sometimes just 1. I use my spade to make the tunnel hole(s) just a little bit bigger for about 6 inches, big enough to slide the trap in so I can just see the back of it. The little traps just cost a few dollars each. I always use some vegetable oil on the parts of the  trap that move to make it extra slippery so it springs fast. And I tie a string to the trap which is tied to a stick or rock so it is easy to pull out when the deed is done.

The first year I did this the little fink would just cover up the trap with dirt over and over again and mock me. So  I learned to do one more thing that no one online ever mentions that makes it work well. Throw it's favorite vegie in the big hole for bait which is almost anything in your garden Leave the hole open and walk away. It will notice lots of fresh air in it's tunnel and come along to block it up and won't be able to resist your fresh bait. It will try to push past the trap and, let's say it's really quick!  I've had a few that were a little harder to get but, like I said... it just takes a few days. I had one that wouldn't go into the trap at first and he kept covering it with dirt.  So I checked on it every hour, cleared the dirt and reset the trap. By the end of the day he must have gotten frustrated and made his fatal mistake.

It is doable! I'm proof of it. And I wish everyone a long life and happy gardening.

That is a bummer and I am sorry to hear of your struggles. On the bright side, they have left much better aerated and water infiltrating soil. I’d say trapping is justifiable if its quick, and if it can feed a carnivorous friend all the better. Another approach is trying to grow on bedrock like I am!) Best of luck next time!

Thanks for the commiseration, everyone.

Cristobal, the happy fruit tree turned dead stick in a hole is something I can sympathize with. I've considered wire cages for them, but haven't done it yet. Our conditions are pretty challenging and we lose a lot of trees even without gophers.  Also, I've encountered gopher tunnels over three feet underground. I didn't think wire would be a worthwhile investment for a tree that had a good chance of dying anyway, and I was worried about restricting the roots and lessening their chances even more.

What I settled on was growing trees from seed, since the gophers seem to ignore small, slowly growing roots in favour of fat juicy ones plunked suddenly in the ground. The main problems with that approach are I have to plant a ridiculous number of seeds, I lose a lot to squirrels and mice, and the trees grow sooooo slowly here that four or five years in, they're still tiny and nowhere near producing fruit. I haven't put as much energy into trees lately, but maybe I should get back at it.

I'm not a fan of cats or their shit in my gardens and love the ground nesting song sparrows too much to let a feline loose on them. My husband and I have talked about letting a ferret loose in a gopher tunnel, but it's a fantasy. I wouldn't feel good about putting a domesticated animal in the wild like that.

Debbie Ann, congratulations on your gopher free paradise! We do trap them. By we, I mean my husband. I'm vegan and I feel sick with guilt everytime he catches one. After a few years of trying every repellant I could find online and having none of them work, I broke down and hypocritically asked him to start trapping. I'm pretty sure he already did, but did it outside the garden and didn't tell me.

We have a couple different styles of traps (and just bought more this weekend), but our gophers are very good at filling them full of dirt. They don't seem to change their behaviour whether there's bait in the traps or not.  I know my husband has some things he does to make the traps more sensitive, but I don't know if he's oiled them. Thanks for that tip!

I was hopeful when I first read that gophers were solitary. Someone needs to inform ours. Last year, between us and the dogs we caught seven, and there were still holes popping up everywhere. The dogs may have caught more, but one of them refuses to eat dead rodents and other one won't eat them until she's carried them around a few days and they get nice and stinky. So I think we pretty much always know when they've got one. I haven't noticed the dogs with any yet this year, but we've caught three so far.  I think we've got six traps set now. Maybe we'll get the numbers down enough that they stop telling each other how to evade the traps.

Thanks, Ben. I do actually have a few beds on bedrock and, yes, they're gopher-free! The rest of the property is basically a gravel pit, so I'm doing everything I can to retain water. The beds where gophers are active always get too dry. So far, I haven't noticed any positive impacts from them, unfortunately.

Actually, Debbie Ann, you did make me feel a bit better. Maybe this is the year we'll start making headway 🤞

Gee!  Don't get me started!

In France we have pocket gophers, I don't know if it is the same as your American gophers.  They seem much smaller but they have the same habits and lifestyle and oh, boy, can they destroy a garden!!!

Carrots, potatoes, leeks, artichokes you name it, the heart breaking result is plain to see,  I once had an entire large pumpkin hollowed out without me noticing anything and they even killed an apple tree.

We tried everything we could think of.  They laughed at the sonic mole repellent and once they  realised that it was just a harmless noise, they came back for a lunch party.

We tried all sorts of things: essential oils on rags buried in their galleries, others strong smelling stuff, dogs hair, human's hair, urine, smoking, flooding of galleries, various plants concoctions and more that I can't even remember - complete waste of time and effort!  They would go away for a day or so and then come back with a vengeance and a voracious appetite.

I did a lot of research and eventually found out that our European critters do not like their galleries open to the elements so that if you clear up their little mound of earth and expose the entrance, they will come and try to close it up again.  Hence comes the perfect trap!

https://www.amazon.com/Reusable-Trapping-Gardening-Cleaning-Resistant/dp/B00KZKTVNM/ref=sr_1_5?crid=1S9DRPQ6UT0MF&keywords=cinch%2Bgopher%2Btrap&qid=1687177727&sprefix=cinch%2Bgopher%2Btrap%2Caps%2C563&sr=8-5&th=1

As they come to close the entrance their nose will touch a very sensitive part of the trap that will instantly close in on them to kill them instantly.

It is best to cover the trap with mud and let it rest in the garden for a day or two in order to lose artificial smells.  In the same way, wear well used garden gloves so that your body odour does not linger on the trap.  Below is a link to a very good video explaining how the trap works.



I have also found out that daffodil bulbs are toxic for them so I planted a ring of them around my artichokes and some shrubs, we'll see if it makes a difference.

I hope this helps someone, somewhere.

I am so sorry to hear of all these troubles. I am grateful to live in a place where we are more likely to have groundhogs than gophers. They don't tunnel as much, so are easier to shoot if needed.

I once planted 2 rows of corn. One sweet corn and one for drying. They were actually ready about the same time. I checked on them late one evening and I thought they were ready, but stupid me... I waited until the morning when I could see better. I was right, because that night every single stalk was ripped down and the cobs eaten or chewed. I'm assuming a raccoon, but I never saw the culprit. The animals know when things are ready :(

Jan,

My conditions are also challenging - freezing winter nights, diurnal temperature differences, afternoon drying winds, droughts and late frosts - last year in the middle of May. I'm surrounded by properties just 30 m higher than me that can grow regular citrus, figs, but I have deep (>3m) soils and tons of water underground.
I already planted around 150 fruit trees and over 750 grape rootstock. I was not caring enough, tried dry farming and lost all grapes and half of trees, but it was before I moved here and had to commute 2000 miles from Midwest to take care of things twice per year.
Now I'm seeing what works and what not. Definitely the wire cages are a must for me. I make them 30 cm diameter x 60 cm tall for fruit trees and 20x40cm for grapes, elderberries, so the 120cm wide roll can be cut in 2 or 3 cage walls. Of course I close the bottoms. The mesh opening has to be not bigger than 12 mm.
I have 90 trees in my orchard and they are happy growing and they start producing fruit and I'm going to plant 40 more next year and add 50 grapes.
I like the seed planting, but this is something that you do for your children. So far I was able to produce two bitter almonds and I started with 60 seeds in pots and was actually caring about them.

Regarding the statement that gophers are solitary - when I was mowing my orchard field few years ago (now I use spring tooth harrow) with a push behind mower I saw gophers running away from noise. I counted around 30 of them on the area of 5000 m2, but some probably did not emerge from their burrows.

I was also thinking about ferrets, but they are illegal here and for a reason. After it finished all rodents it would go after all poultry. They are voracious. Also - according to my friend who had few ferrets before - they would never return if left outside. Their curiosity would overpower the will to return :)

We might have similar gophers, Olga. Ours are called northern pocket gophers, and they're quite small, usually about 15-18cm long. I've never seen one out of its hole (alive), but I often see the ground shaking as the gopher tries to pull something down by the roots.

We have some metal traps that are similar to the pincer ones you linked to. My husband has been happy enough with them in the past, but this year especially the gophers have been very good at packing them full of dirt so they don't trigger. The only gopher we've caught so far this year has been in a different type of trap that my husband modified to make more sensitive.  One of these:

https://www.victorpest.com/victor-the-black-box-gopher-trap-0626

He took the safety spring out, and I think he added a flap of plastic to make the trigger point wider, so the gopher can't push dirt around the edges and clog things up.

Let me know if the daffodils help. I tried planting castor beans and they just chewed them off at the base to kill them 🙄 I'd have to buy a ridiculous amount of daffodils to enclose all three of my garden areas, but if it works, it might be worth it. 🤔

Matt McSpadden wrote: I thought they were ready, but stupid me... I waited until the morning when I could see better. I was right, because that night every single stalk was ripped down and the cobs eaten or chewed. I'm assuming a raccoon, but I never saw the culprit. The animals know when things are ready :(

Ha! This is what happens to my strawberries. This year it seems to be mice eating them, which is new. Up until now, it was always crickets! And, yeah, they only eat the perfectly ripe ones.

Usually the chipmunks eat our saskatoons even before they're ripe, but we've got a high energy, rodent hunting dog now, so the chipmunks keep their distance. This year, I was sitting outside and out of the corner of my eye noticed saskatoons falling from a bush. I went to see what was going on and it was ants. They'd chew at the part of the ripe berry they could reach from the stem. Eventually there wasn't enough flesh attached to the stem anymore and the berry would fall. Of course, there were more ants under the bush to clean up the fallen ones.

We'll see what gets my gooseberries this year.

I'm glad your orchard is doing better, Cristobal!

When we first moved here, I underestimated how challenging things would be and planted way more trees than I could care for. Gophers ate a lot of them and almost all the rest died due to terrible soil (just sand and gravel, really) and various mistakes on my part.

Oh, wow, I am bloody furious and sick at this destruction.

I mean, we can leave a bit for other creatures. But rodents are sorta like some humans, and need to take everything they can get.

Meanwhle, squirrels are plucking strawberries off my plants. Directly observed. Well, you have made the big dog angry -- stand by for the very focused rebuttal.

Recipes anyone? Best practice for processing the carcass?

We might have similar gophers, Olga. Ours are called northern pocket gophers, and they're quite small, usually about 15-18cm long. I've never seen one out of its hole (alive), but I often see the ground shaking as the gopher tries to pull something down by the roots.

Sounds about right Jan, that's about the size of our critters.  I have on occasion seen their heads poking out of the opening in the ground, almost taunting me.  I swear I could see a smile on their face!!!  I have also seen my leeks and carrots slowly disappearing in the ground, well, not so slowly, and I could be forgiven to think I was stuck in a bugs bunny cartoon!  I have cried in rage and frustration many a time.

I don't quite go with the idea that they are solitary animals.  Even if they are, their lifespan is 6 to 8 months, maybe 10.  The female will give birth to up to 8 babies, 5 or 6 times a year.  Solitary maybe, but it's a darn big family if you ask me.  Especially if you consider that the gestation period is 3 weeks, the young ones are autonomous in 4 weeks and sexually mature at 2 months old.  Like I said, a darn lot of solitary critters in my garden!!

I forgot to mention that the little blighters are very smart,  After a while, they get used to the traps, and find ways to avoid them.  I guess changing  the trap model every 6 to 8 months might get around that problem.  I have not tried this yet.

Our biggest problems here are voles and now a whole family of groundhogs moved in.  They ate the corn, tomato plants, the okra, the melon plants and got into a cattle panel trellis where I had large pots of green beans growing.  Ate 4 pots full and turned over one of those 30 gallon pots.  I replanted corn and okra 3 times, and they still did so much damage, not enough corn left to pollinate properly.  Too late in the year to replant.  I expect a little critter damage, but they don’t share!  I did all the work, they reap all the harvest.  Not fair!  And they are much too smart to go into a trap or maybe it is just that smorgasbord of a garden they see that looks more inviting than the tidbits I leave in the trap.  

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:

Meanwhle, squirrels are plucking strawberries off my plants. Directly observed. Well, you have made the big dog angry -- stand by for the very focused rebuttal.

Do you have a method for catching squirrels?

One of our dogs goes absolutely bonkers every time she hears a squirrel. She races over to whatever tree they're in and barks and jumps up the trunk and acts generally ridiculous. They're a lot quieter since we've got her and they stay in the taller trees and leave the bushes alone. I might actually get some hazelnuts this year!

Maybe you need a squirrel dog!

Ugh! That sounds awful, Faye!

I've luckily never had to deal with groundhogs (yet), so I have no suggestions. I sympathize, though.

We have a couple types of marmots where I live, groundhogs and hoary marmots. We have perfect conditions for both of them, so I'm always on the lookout for some moving in.

Maybe you'll get some corn next year 🙄

We seem to always have a pack rat around. For the last few years we've never had a problem, but this year, one's been doing weird stuff in the garden and hanging out in the shed I keep a couple straw bales in, stinking it up and pooping everywhere. So out came the live trap.

I've heard so many stories of how hard it is to trap pack rats, but ours are so curious and trusting we've never even baited the trap. We just put it out and a day or two later, there's a pack rat in it.

Pack rats are another one of those solitary animals. Yeah, right. We've caught three in four nights, and I think there's at least one more around. No wonder I was noticing so much activity!

We drive way up the highway to release them, so we're not causing a problem for anyone else. I make a baskety thing out of willow, stuff it full of straw, put a bit of dog food in, and transfer the pack rat into it from the trap. Then we find a creek up a logging road and I put the basket in some bushes nearby. I hope that by giving it a hiding place, easy access to water, and a bit of calorie dense food, it'll have a chance to get established.

They're really charming rodents. I wish they didn't stink so bad and make such a mess.

I had a Richardson ground squirrel/pocket gopher/rodent/vole problem on my farm, especially around the garden and fruit trees. Then I found about the propane gophinator, injects propane and oxygen down the tunnel, spark the igniter and it evacuates the oxygen and collapses the tunnel all in one moment. You will have to check local regulations if you are allowed to use it in an urban area, but on the farm we have a bit more leeway. Word of caution, stand off to the side of the tunnel opening with your back towards it, because little rocks and clumps of soil may be projected out of the tunnel from the blast. Can honestly say I enjoyed watching, seeing, and feeling each blast every time lol

Olga Booker wrote:Gee!  Don't get me started!

In France we have pocket gophers, I don't know if it is the same as your American gophers.  They seem much smaller but they have the same habits and lifestyle and oh, boy, can they destroy a garden!!!

Carrots, potatoes, leeks, artichokes you name it, the heart breaking result is plain to see,  I once had an entire large pumpkin hollowed out without me noticing anything and they even killed an apple tree.

We tried everything we could think of.  They laughed at the sonic mole repellent and once they  realised that it was just a harmless noise, they came back for a lunch party.

We tried all sorts of things: essential oils on rags buried in their galleries, others strong smelling stuff, dogs hair, human's hair, urine, smoking, flooding of galleries, various plants concoctions and more that I can't even remember - complete waste of time and effort!  They would go away for a day or so and then come back with a vengeance and a voracious appetite.

I did a lot of research and eventually found out that our European critters do not like their galleries open to the elements so that if you clear up their little mound of earth and expose the entrance, they will come and try to close it up again.  Hence comes the perfect trap!

https://www.amazon.com/Reusable-Trapping-Gardening-Cleaning-Resistant/dp/B00KZKTVNM/ref=sr_1_5?crid=1S9DRPQ6UT0MF&keywords=cinch%2Bgopher%2Btrap&qid=1687177727&sprefix=cinch%2Bgopher%2Btrap%2Caps%2C563&sr=8-5&th=1

As they come to close the entrance their nose will touch a very sensitive part of the trap that will instantly close in on them to kill them instantly.

It is best to cover the trap with mud and let it rest in the garden for a day or two in order to lose artificial smells.  In the same way, wear well used garden gloves so that your body odour does not linger on the trap.  Below is a link to a very good video explaining how the trap works.

I have also found out that daffodil bulbs are toxic for them so I planted a ring of them around my artichokes and some shrubs, we'll see if it makes a difference.

I hope this helps someone, somewhere.

Oh Olga!!! I've had exactly the same frustrations with the French gophers! I don't believe they're solitary, but live in clans...
Next to gobbling up all the sunchokes ( topinamboer ) and other vegetables I thought I had planted as food for me and my family, they killed a lot of fruit trees, starting with the most expensive and rare ones ( apricots ).
I only now see this thread and your solution, THANK YOU!!!
Ha, there's hope for the wanna-be perma-forest-gardener...