Garden status to date, and seeking suggestions on rodent visitors

[Cheryl Conklin]

 

Good morning!  I thought that I'd update on my garden status to date and seek some suggestions on my issues thus far.

 

Last weekend, Jeff and I enjoyed our first arugula salad from the garden of the season, accompanied by fresh oregano, chives and thyme that all recovered from this mild winter.  Yeah!

 

Meanwhile, I've planted peas and snap peas, and each time I've been thwarted.  It appears that I have vole/mole/field mouse tunnels throughout the raised beds, and those little buggers have been digging up the seeds.  Thus far I've tried:

• garlic spray and cayenne
• running a hose down the tunnels, which only seems to irritate them as the next morning they create even more raised tunnels
• in desperation, looked at these little 'mole bombs' that a friend suggested, but the directions state specifically that they are for 'non-crop areas'
• mouse traps on the garden bed, but no takers

I just bought some blood meal mixed with cayenne pepper concoction that claims to be a repellant and a couple of these items that claim to repel moles by making a 'warning sound'.

 

I know that I need to get them out of here before they start mulitiplying.  Any thoughts on either of those or other suggestions?

 

Many thanks!

[Larry Fisher]

For 2 years we tried to battle our vole and field mice garden problems (tunnels throughout, bean, peas, potatoes eaten and plants destroyed, etc.). Tried scores of different types of traps at a time both in tunnels on on surface plus bait. All were ineffective. Our vegetable garden is about 40' x 40' and this year not a single tunnel detected nor any rodent damage. Last year there was no bean stalk damage. The previous year we lost 2/3 of the stalks by field mice eating through their bases. The secret---we got kittens who grew into 2 cats (one caught its 1st field mouse in the garden at 7 weeks of age). This is our 2nd gardening season with our 2 cats. A bonus is we don't have deer damage anymore either. We use to have 3 deer herds travel through and some would camp all summer under our apple tree. All day they would eat and sleep there. Must be that deer can't discern the difference in smell of domestic cats and cougars. The cats are out during daylight (mostly) but kept indoors at other times to the danger of coyotes, raccoons, etc. One trick I used when they were kittens and a mouse would get away from them into a garden tunnel, was to hose water into the tunnel and flush it out for the kitten to get it. Larry

[Cheryl Conklin]

Larry, thanks for the quick response!

The good news is that ther is a solution. The bad news is that I already have a barn cat; I guess I'm feeding him too much! When the weather warms up a bit, I think I'll plant a little catnip near the veggy garden to get him to hang out around there more often.

It appears that the rodents are out with a vengeance. When my husband went to Lowe's to pick up some traps, he said they were all sold out!

Cheryl

[Larry Fisher]

Sorry to hear that your still having the problem even with a cat. I think your idea of encouraging the cat to spend more time is the garden is a good one. Even if it doesn’t catch all the pests I think just the presence makes the rodents more cautious and some may even move out of the area because they see it as to dangerous a place to live. I don’t think our cats caught every individual. But between the ones they caught and others probably moving out for the above mentioned reason the population hasn’t been a problem recently. Hope you can get your barn cat to work better for you.

One other idea I just thought of is that you can start the peas in containers and transplant them out after most of the seed is gone and the rodents won’t want the leftover seeds. I know transplanting peas isn’t ideal, but for the short term it might enable you to get some peas while you are still trying to get rid of the pests. Good luck.

Ruthann