How could a Permie deal with Voles?

Hi Folks,
I'm not sure if there is a better section to post this but:
How should a Permie deal with voles?
In the past we have used beneficial nematodes, but I don't think that would follow Permaculture principles.
Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thank you!

Well, I can only say that I am territorial regarding my food gardens and my buildings. Voles and deer mice have the same imperative, don't be fooled. This side's yours, and that side's mine, so move it on over. Snap traps without mercy. They reproduce exponentially, based on the expectation of massive predation. If there is an imbalance, I have no choice but to be the predator. My 2c.

Cats.
Don't think mine always like to eat them, but they do end them. Effectively.
Owls.
Snowy owls can hear them under the snow from a silent hover. That feathered, round facial disk focuses sound to their ultra sharp ears. Dive/pounce.

I have a cat and he catches a few voles, but not all of them.

My dog gets at least a dozen a year (mostly young/babies) she has great hearing and smell. It's a little rough on the gardens tho when she digs.

I like to think that the extra rocks, sticks, and weeds all around give good black rat snake habitat, I see plenty of them out on sunny days and find sheds often.

Thats all I do, and yes I get plenty of nibbles from voles especially on the sweet potatoes but thats how it goes in my book.

As an aspiring farmer who sells the main crops I grow it can be frustrating but I like to take a lot more things into account than just the $. Me and the other farm I co-op with eat the nibbled on ones :)

If I have a serious issue with a crop, my philosphy is just grow more or don't grow it at all. I understand not everyone is able to, or wants to take that approach but it works well for my psyche which I value above all else.

Err, maybe the voles in my world are not the voles the OP is talking about? Details please.

I used water.  Flooded the bed that the voles liked several times a day with water.

Ants liked that bed too so the voles got both water and vinegar ...

Now I have a cat ....

I have cats and yet I had more damage from voles last year than ever before.  Seems they love the deep mulch and no-dig philosophy I've implemented.  I only tolerate one cat within my garden area and that's because she's the queen and loves to sun herself in the paths.  To date I've never witnessed or found any evidence of her using it as a litter box.  Other cats have free reign of the property, including the area around the gardens.  The only thing I can actually say they haven't bothered is the garlic bed.

I've never tried water but honestly I'm only catching a fraction of what I use for the garden and the rest comes from a municipal source.  Largest garden is farthest away from the water supply and I rely on gravity fed water from my barrels to irritate when necessary.  Of course we also had extreme drought conditions last year which may account for the increase in activity.

I don't want to use poison and my research on the electronic repellants doesn't leave me reassured that they will work for the long term.  Not growing a crop or growing more than usual isn't always possible when you're trying to be as self-sufficient as possible and feed a family.

I hadn't heard of using nematodes to get rid of voles....
I'd also like to find a solution. I suspect that it will be different for every situation. I'm improving my soil by making raised beds - that helps the soil warm up more quickly and makes it better draining. However it also makes favoured habitat for the vole holes. I've also found that my piles of twiggy prunings make ideal habitat for voles....I'm hoping that by making the piles of kindling further away from my growing area that might encourage the voles to live outside commuting distance . I've put up a tall perch to encourage local raptors to pop in for a snack. The dogs are worse than the voles for crop damage! So they are fenced out. I did find a short cardboard fence was remarkably effective at stopping the voles nipping through my pea stems - plastic vole guards were effective to protect my young trees, so it seemed worth a try. Voles can't climb well (unlike mice). I'm going to try polyculture - mixing my peas and fava beans up to see if that helps the peas survive this year.

To deal with a vole, one must BECOME the vole.

Okay, maybe not that intense but the sentiment is the same. Anytime I have pest issues, I try to put myself in the pest's fur. What is it that they like about my little piece of property? Is it the habitat? Is it the food? Maybe a little column a and a little column b?

Voles consume things from small plants, to carrion, to fruits and nuts. Voles have been known to contribute to girdling of plants through chewing the bark. A pesky attribute of voles is that the can eat plants from the root system up so you might not detect them until some damage has been done. Voles, in nature, have been seen to live up to around twelve months but having shorter lifespans is more common. They are prey animals for numerous species including hawks, owls, racoons, and cats.

Outside of garden fencing, one of my newer defenses has been found by accident. I have 'trenched' some drainage on the outside of my fenced garden around 6"-8" deep and utilized gravel fill to keep the trench from being a trip hazard but still drain. I see evidence of digging critters outside of this trench, but none of them have come into my garden. Depending on your location, this might be something to explore?

That gravel trench is an interesting idea.
Along those lines. Lil'B plants her 6500 odd garlic in the fall. She waits to straw them over until it is below freezing consistently at night. Lets the mice and voles find somewhere else to winter over.  

why wouldn't nematodes be a perfect permies answer if they work?  It is a biological control that is natural and leaves no chemical residue behind.

I can say from experience if you have a rodent population explosion no reasonable number of cats will make a difference.  And simple math will show it.  Say you start out with 100 rodents and 4 cats.  Many voles, moles and mice have gestation periods in the 20 day range.  Say each cat catches and eats 1 a day.  That means if all births are synced that the new wave is born when there are still 20 to catch.  At 10 rodents per liter that means you have 200 new rodents Cats might catch up with this if everything went perfectly but most likely is a failure.  Now not all liters will be 10 but on the other side of the issue the cats won't necessarily get hungry enough to catch something every day.

Some form of physical or chem warfare will be needed.  Never had any luck with the repellents.

On the to try list would be

1.  cornmeal and baking soda mix bait.  Works on mice and some other rodents.  Will your voles eat cornmeal bait?

2.  Traps.  If population is high we never caught back up.  Does make cat food cheap.

3.  Big walls so the whole bed can flooded at one time.  Most plants will stand 12 hour immersions.  It may hurt them but usually won't kill them.  The sides need to be slick enough at the water top, the rodents can't crawl out.  You need them to stay swimming so they either drown or you can skim them out to dispose of.

4.  Tent a large area and kill by CO.  Use a small engine not a car as the source as catalytic converters destroy the CO.  You will have to cool it so it doesn't cook the plants so maybe down a long tube before going in.  CO is heavier than air so it should pool in the tunnels over time

I have a 3-tiered defense system against voles

1) Hardware cloth covering the soil, concrete blocks around it with electrical wire (they cannot dig under it and get zapped when they climb over the blocks). Here I plant my potatoes
2) Sunchokes on the side of my yard as a trap crop.
3) cornmeal/baking soda in 4-inch pvc pipes in my garden

2 and 3 have these benefits: I kill the voles that don't like sunchokes, so in essence I breed sunchoke-loving voles. Those sunchoke-loving voles are in such a nice and big area somewhat away from my garden and closer to a wooded area, that they can eat and breed to their heart's content, which grows the population and will attract predators. Those predators keep all voles in check.

M

Voles?  These cute little guys?



They cleaned me out of carrots and potatoes one year.  The next year I got cats and started letting the dog in the garden.  I put up perches for predators too.  I don't know what worked best but I did not have any trouble from voles after that.    

https://www.upnativeplants.com/post/4-reasons-to-love-voles

Nancy Reading wrote:I hadn't heard of using nematodes to get rid of voles....
I'd also like to find a solution. I did find a short cardboard fence was remarkably effective at stopping the voles nipping through my pea stems - plastic vole guards were effective to protect my young trees, so it seemed worth a try. Voles can't climb well (unlike mice). I'm going to try polyculture - mixing my peas and fava beans up to see if that helps the peas survive this year.

Please provide more info on the cardboard fence as in where you bought it and how you use it. And then please keep us informed as to how the peas and fava beans mix works out for you.

A long time ago, I had read somewhere that most critters don't like the taste of daffodils or anything in the allium family, and it is true; I believe daffs are poisonous.  I made sure to plant many of both of these throughout my permaculture beds.  So far, so good.  Lots of damage to the lawn, but none within the garden.  I use daffs to protect bulbs that they do like as well!  I have garlic, and daffs throughout and it extends to season of bloom, so it's a win-win in my book.  You're not supposed to cut back the leaves of daffodils, but when the flowers are done, I do flatten the leaves on the ground and it acts like a mulch.  I even plant them behind the hosta which I use as a border between lawn and garden.  That way, the hosta leaves, when they come up, cover the debris of the daffodils and other spring bulbs.

Voles are an unpredictable lot.  I've had whole years where I didn't see any, others where they hit tree starts in the middle of a pasture, and still others where they were only at the edge of the woods.  If anyone is a 'vole whisperer', I'd love to sit at the feet of the master. :P  I've had them leave me with sticks from overwintering propagated trees, eating the entire root system.  They seem to especially love hazelnut roots.

What I do?  I start with detection.  Where are they active?  I throw down slices of apple or potato and cover it with cardboard or a trash can lid everywhere I think they might be active - and a few places I don't as a control.  I check them every few days to once a week.  If I see them actively feeding, I continue to feed at that spot (making it a regular stop for them).  Then I put snap traps baited with the same food at those spots and religiously check them every morning to clear out any caught voles.  I repeat this until I am no longer catching, then go back to my monitoring slices.

If using cardboard, I'll put the food in a little depression to give the trap arm room to swing.

Predators definitely help, but no one predator (cats, snakes, owls, etc.) will get them all...so I encourage all of them.  I have cover and brush piles for snakes and martens and I put the caught voles on the tops of fence posts.  That calls in both cats and owls.

My damage isn't zero, but it's manageable.

Where i live (north carolina) they are absolutely horrendous, the deep sapprolite and clay soil lets them build subteranian cities, and have had them absolutely destroy beds of all types. The best solution ive found is to trench around beds and bury mesh about a foot deep.... they dont seem to like going deeper than that. 1/4 inch hardware cloth works, expanded lath works, have wanted to try some experiement s with filling the besd with coarse rammed gravel as well... but either way, that physical barrier really seems to do the trick and they dont seem to like coming up (my cat, hawks, snakes, and owls are up there)... hope this helps

I am making hugelkutur beds now and running stainless steel screen under them. I hope it works!  We also have a drop off to a creek that I’m told has abundant black snakes. I plan on planting veggies along the tree line to tempt them to stay in the woods. Time will tell. I’ve never done anything like this so I imagine I will make plenty of mistakes.

Samantha Lewis wrote:Voles?  These cute little guys?

Yep. That's the perp shot.

We have lived in places where the voles were horrendously damaging to trees and root crops. Of 3000 pounds of carrots ,beets and potatoes , every fall about 1/2 of them had been eaten on, which meant they would not store through the winter in the root cellar. They were one of the catalysts for moving from that homestead and when we packed up our belongings in boxes, I made sure every box was taped securely shut so that we would not introduce any hitchhikers to the vole-free land we were moving to.
Guess what? 5 years later, the voles have arrived. I think someone must have inadvertently brought them here. Argh. They've really been doing a number on my greenhouse greens the last couple of winters.

The best way of trapping them I learned from Eliot Coleman of the   'Four Season Harvest ' book fame. He gets the Best Mouse Trap, and hides them just inside the hole he cuts into an old fishing tackle box or homemade wooden box of the same size. The voles like to go inside dark boxes and the trap gets them as soon as they enter. It seems to be a more effective method than having traps out in the open.  
https://growingformarket.com/articles/trap-boxes-the-scourge-winter-growing-voles

I don't have a vole problem at this point, but here's a suggestion from fellow Mainer Elliot Colman from a old MOFGA article:

For vole control, Coleman builds small wooden boxes with a removable cover and with a mouse-sized hole on each of two sides.  He places a set trap inside each hole (The Better Mousetrap, from Intruder, Inc., www.intruderinc.com) and adds a long handle for carrying the box. “Don’t use bait,” he advised. “Just spring the traps.” Voles eventually associate the smell of baits with the death of fellow voles; without bait, they encounter a “small dark hole that smells like vole” after the first vole has entered, and they enter the box and run into the trap. Empty the traps daily.

https://www.mofga.org/resources/season-extension/colemans-low-tunnels/

Physical Barrier:  https://staliteenvironmental.com/vole-control-1
apparently is sharpish rocks that voles don't like to dig through. But still needs an overground barrier.

I have hundreds of pounds of fist-sized rocks that I need to get rid of (long story!) and am thinking of trenching around one of the inground beds and filling with the rocks. Then will just need an above-ground barrier.

My above-ground raised bed, bottom and sides of old metal corrogated roofing, got vole invaded. I think they got in the corners where the ends of the roofing couldn't exactly meet because of the corrogations and I didn't expect them to climb up the wood pallet sidings to reach the openings. Now I have to dig out the corners and reinforce them with metal.

In other beds, I will try what I used to do for the rampant pillbugs (they LOVE girdling pea sprouts) and earwigs: take 2 liter soda bottles (from a friend), make tubes to start the plants indoors then plant the whole tube outdoors. (For earwigs, I extended the tube with a second soda bottle to make it too high to seem worth climbing. But as the new beds with their wood chips aged, the ear wigs seem to not be the ravenous problem anymore as they were in the first years.)

Seems anything I want to grow, the voles (possibly gophers too) want to eat.  Out of a couple thousand tea plants, I have maybe a couple hundred left, with the rest having their roots eaten off to within an inch or so of the surface.  And that was only because I quit weeding and let blackberries, etc. take over the tea plots.  That did slow down the destruction.  But trapping would only grab an occasional rodent, and all of the underground traps only caught moles which don't eat the roots.  I won't do chemicals.  The cats have caught a few, but are essentially useless for a large area.  Raptors are around, but again, the few they grab make little difference.  After many years I've given up on planting anything in the ground.  Felt pots work ... for a while, then one chews through and eats whatever is inside.  Tens of thousands of dollars wasted.  I do have a couple truck loads of rock, with the idea that I would trench about three feet deep around my plots and fill them with rock.  But, afterwards, I decided against it.  Just a little shift in the dirt, a little too much rain, an errant root, and a tiny hole develops and they swarm in ... after I've raised the plants for four or five years!  Just not worth it.  And there are documented reviews of them making dens up to six feet deep.  They have taken control of my land, and they own it.  I can only put in a few meager beds within my 30 acres surrounded by hardware cloth and hope my few hundred, or with lots of luck my few thousand square feet will suffice.  I gave up.

It sounds like my voles aren't as bad as your little guys! I think these are what I deal with wildlife trust on field voles which mostly eat above ground things. They do seem to eat the pignut tubers when I have dug them up for them!

Beth Borchers wrote: Please provide more info on the cardboard fence as in where you bought it and how you use it. And then please keep us informed as to how the peas and fava beans mix works out for you.

The cardboard was just from the boxes that our butcher delivers the meat in. Thick solid (as opposed to corrugated) with a plastic coating on eone side. From what people are writing here though I don't think it will work against North American supervole ("he can dig, he can climb...") UK voles do dig, but they mostly eat grass. They do like the bark off young trees and (apparently) pea stalks!

From my growing stuff project thread

just snipped through

cardboard protection fence

So my voles don't climb, and although I think they do burrow, they mostly just run at ground level. I don't think these barriers will be sufficient for your critters.

Nina Wright wrote:Physical Barrier:  https://staliteenvironmental.com/vole-control-1
apparently is sharpish rocks that voles don't like to dig through. But still needs an overground barrier.

in Germany people try the same method with cheap normal 8-16mm-gravel-layers, which are 15cm thick.webpage

Two things here, not unique...

1) My best mouser would just kill gophers, squirrels, and moles... but to her voles were cat candy. Unfortunately, she's been gone for some time and the 2 cats we have now are both house cats and not hunters.

2) The year we were completely overrun with vermin (3 years ago) near the end of the season, the foxes and hawks got a clue. We had more foxes than I've ever seen that year and one day I looked up in my veggie garden to see an owl, vermin in beak, standing on the path on the other side of the veggie garden.

So, we didn't do anything, except acquire the mouser and it wasn't obvious when she was a small purring fluffball that she had been extremely well trained by her momma!

The owl is why I intend to add an owl hole, if we ever get lucky enough to have a garage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owl_hole

In my garden, I often dig parsnips and then forget some of them. The voles really love them. I don't know if it is related but the voles haven't been much trouble with the young trees I planted. My thought is that they prefer the sweet, tender parsnips over the trees. The turnips survived the winter untouched so I'm not sure whether they just don't like turnips as much? Parsnips are well loved though. I once was sitting in the garden and watched as a vole scurried up to the parsnip that I had unearthed, took a bite, scurried back under the grass and chewed and chewed. And again and again. I don't mind since the parsnips aren't all for me; the land sowed and grew them for all of us. I usually leave a few parsnips behind by accident, so maybe these are enough to satisfy the voles for the most part.

My area also has a lot of ecological and successional diversity and that helps greatly with predation. They have a lot to choose from, so don't have to eat exclusively from what I plant. When they do decimate a plant I take that as a sign the land doesn't want to grow them or at least needs some nurturing before it is time for the plant to grow.

I know that I have mentioned this before somewhere. Construction of my earth sheltered home involved tons of backfill they attracted an entire metropolis of what we called ground squirrels. Perhaps they were, or were similar to, voles? They ate everything I planted in the ground. I tried flooding them out, encouraging snakes(I would love to have more snakes), raising beds, gassing them with flares, etc. Nothing worked and I couldn’t bring myself to poison them. We decided that the only answer was to outsmart them. (Who is smarter than a couple of retired PhDs?) Ha.

We started importing old bath tubs and put them Up on concrete blocks. Success. They can’t climb over the tub lips. It limits my garden square footage but I have several and can grow enough to satisfy me. And I plant tomatoes in stacks of tires, some wrapped with wire.

Lately, the last few years, the ground squirrels seem to have disappeared. I suspect that a neighbor poisoned them. In any case I can now plant potatoes and pumpkins in the ground without risk. (Chipmunks on the other hand…)

I don’t see an option here for including a photo but I will try to do that at some point.

A couple years ago I purchased some solar powered vole repellers.
They work great!
Last year the population expanded, but not in my garden.  No voles in the garden.
I just purchased a few more of these because I have a second garden that I saw signs of voles within a few feet of it.

Just search for solar powered vole repellent.  I bought mine on Amazon.

Cole Tyler wrote:My dog gets at least a dozen a year (mostly young/babies) she has great hearing and smell. It's a little rough on the gardens tho when she digs.

Yup. We have Bubba. No more than two strokes with those clam diggers will get most voles. It's hilarious if you notice him just staring at the ground. Nose in place and ears tilted. Then comes 'The Paw'. Here he is guarding his beloved raw asparagus stumps. A wish person does not try to steal asparagus stumps from his bowl.

Maybe voles don't like garlic, but gophers sure do.  I have to protect it with hardware cloth.

If you want an animal that is going to be dedicated to killing rodents, I think a Jack Russel or similar breed is a better bet than a cat.  My mutt is very predatory and will spend all day killing rodents outside.  Bring her in and she lays on the couch and ignores the mice I had to trap.  She killed two when we first moved here, and then just stopped caring about indoor rodents.  I've always adopted, but you never know what you will get with a mixed breed.  I'm in a new area, but I never had a problem with voles bothering my potatoes or other veggies when I lived in NC with clay soil.  I didn't have a fence or other protection, and before my dog there were a lots of rabbits and groundhogs too; but my garden was free from all small mammal pests after I brought her home and she wasn't even outside all the time.  I used to put the sweepings from inside the house in the garden too.  
You can buy predator pee and try that as a deterrent.  There is coyote, fox, bobcat, and mixes available to help scare rodents and rabbits away.  

I have worked on two farms that swore by Jack Russel dogs for rodent control.  Cats can be useful, but they are not usually as obsessive about it as a dog bred for this purpose.   These dogs will want to do nothing else, and if you can deal with the damage from their digging, they will kill, kill, kill whether they are hungry or not, and they never get bored with it.  They will cry by the door for you to let them out to hunt.

You can contact a Jack Russel rescue and they often know if there is a predatory one available in a foster home.  I know one of the farms had adopted an adult Jack that was given up for being too predatory.  The other farm had sought out a breeder that produced dogs for this trait, and participated in earth dog trials.  They raised the puppy around chickens and cats, so the dog didn't bother those.  If you brought this dog by the pond he would hunt bubbles in it.  Their hunting is an obsessive compulsive disorder.
My dog is not quite as dedicated, but she seemed effective enough in our past location.

We have hugelkultures and deep mulch, a voles paradise. They eat our root vegetables and their tunnels have caused seedlings to collapse into the bed and disappear. I started out with about a dozen mouse traps baited with peanut butter placed directly in front of their holes. This worked great to kill some quickly, but it was taking me like 20 minutes a day to check traps, bait them, reset them and dispose of voles. Plus, the garden was full of mousetraps. Now we have a cat. She’s born to hunt and is good at it, and now we have a nice cat to hang out with. Only downsides is she also kills other things like birds and shrews and we have cat poop to deal with.

Theres no free lunch. Everything has its down sides🤷🏻‍♂️

Dealing with voles in a permaculture-friendly way can be a challenge, but there are several effective solutions that align with sustainable practices. While beneficial nematodes can help control certain soil-dwelling pests, voles require a more strategic approach.

One of the best long-term solutions is installing a vole-proof fence. As a fence contractor in Port Arthur, I’ve seen many gardeners successfully protect their plants by using a fine-mesh barrier (such as 1/4-inch hardware cloth) buried at least 6–12 inches into the ground to prevent burrowing. Raised garden beds with wire mesh bottoms can also deter them.

In addition to fencing, incorporating natural predators like owls by installing owl boxes, using castor oil-based repellents, and planting vole-resistant crops can help keep their population under control. Mulch depth should also be minimized near plant bases, as thick mulch can create an inviting habitat for voles.

Hope this helps, and best of luck with your garden!

This one could use some verification...

After moving into my yurt, I slowly realized that my dreams of visiting the land of Lilliputians had less to do with having recently read Johnathan Swift and more to do with the things scurrying off of my quilt, made clear when I eventually woke up at the right time. I had anticipated problems with ants and other critters so had bought some diatomaceous earth after reading about it here at Permies.com. I spread it around the perimeter of the yurt floor and immediately the voles vanished from the space. Mice have persisted and I've taken care of them with snap traps. All mice since then, no more voles.

I don't recall if I did snap traps in the yurt before applying the DE, but I was trapping while living and cooking in more exposed tents and was catching voles more than mice back then.

I've never encountered anyone else mentioning that DE could affect mammal behaviour like that, so wondering if it was just a coincidence with another event that displaced them? Can't recall seeing evidence of them elsewhere since then, but the yurt is well away from the hugels and I just don't watch for rodents closely outside of the 'nest'.

Anyway, are DE 'barriers' practical in outdoor spaces? Does rain wash them away too quickly to be worth laying them out?

Steph Schmidtmeyer wrote:

Tommy Bolin wrote:
Snowy owls can hear them under the snow from a silent hover. That feathered, round facial disk focuses sound to their ultra sharp ears. Dive/pounce.

Great grey owls also live on rodents, mostly voles (the chickens are safe!), using sound and infrared detection to locate prey under snow. We have great grey owls here, and to see one is a great pleasure. They are huge, graceful, and absolutely magnificent.

One potential long-term partial solution with permie principles involved is starving them over the winter. I channel my inner robber baron and treat the voles like thieving peasants.

I get 55-gal drums with the removable lids, stack empty milk jugs horizontally inside (uncapped), and put the drum lid back on. The inverted drums then get placed out in the pasture and by the garden, using bricks as spacers underneath so the voles can access the open bung holes on the underside. I drive a t-post next to the drum and tie onto that to keep it from blowing over, and put a bit of peanut butter inside the lid because I don't want to risk the drum going unexplored for too long.

This provides what the voles recognize as a perfect seed storage bin (which it is) for them (which it is not) to use for winter stockpiles. They clearly devote quite a bit of energy towards that, because sometimes the jugs are packed so full of seeds I can't move the drums by myself come wintertime. I've got a diverse polyculture mix in my pasture, and leave swaths ungrazed so it can go to seed. Having the voles collect the seed for me to broadcast and refresh the pasture each year saves me time, energy and money. And as the neighboring farmer includes seed alfalfa or grain crops in his rotation, I get an addition of those seeds into my polyculture pasture mix for free.

It's not going to ever exterminate the entire vole population from my property, but it stands to reason that removing that much of their winter food supply is going to put a dent in the population, or at least diminish their ability to ever generate an apocalyptic population boom that would threaten my gardening and tree planting efforts.

While the malice in my heart towards them is no doubt at odds with purebred permaculture principles, I tell myself it's the thought (of hijacking natural systems to gather seed) that counts.