About Gophers
Before starting any efforts to attain a gopher-free yard, make sure that the rodents burrowing in your lovely grass are, in fact, gophers. Also called pocket gophers, sometimes they can be mistaken for moles. They are burrowing animals that can cause unsightly holes and mounds in your yard.
Another undesirable trait is their tendency to destroy bulbs of plants, eat roots and pull down plants into their burrows to eat. You can tell you have gophers by their flat, fan-shaped hills, and gray or light brown fur. Moles make round, conical hills and have black or dark brown fur.
These methods will help you get rid of gophers yourself, but professional pest control companies also can use other methods like poisons, fumigation, and even gas explosives. These usually require licenses to use.
Flooding Gophers Out of the Yard
Flooding is a non-lethal way to get rid of gophers. Be careful, though: flooding tunnels that are close to or touching house or outbuilding foundations can cause water to seep in through the foundation and damage the building, or result in a basement leak.
Gopher tunnels can be hard to identify, since they are not usually visible from the surface, so you have to rely on getting the water down the visible holes by their mounds. To drive out gophers, you should flood the tunnels quickly and dramatically. Prepare a row of five-gallon buckets of water and get some helpers to pour them all down the gopher holes at the same time.
This should be done in late winter or early spring, before breeding season, and is most effective on new infestations of gophers rather than long-established burrows.
Fencing Prized Gardens Against Gophers
Creating barriers around prized plants or gardens is a worthwhile protection effort. Raised beds are the easiest to protect; simply nail wire mesh hardware cloth around the bottoms and sides of beds. When planting new trees, plant them inside a wire basket frame that will protect the new sapling’s roots.
Existing trees and gardens are more difficult to protect, but there are two methods. One is to dig a deep trench – at least two feet, and deeper if you can — on all sides of the garden or tree and fill it tightly with rocks. Another is to install underground gopher fencing, in the form of wire mesh hardware cloth. Dig a deep trench, bend the cloth at the bottom of the trench so it curves away from the tree or garden, and refill the trench, burying the cloth.
However, both of these may only be temporary protections, as gophers can dig as deep as they care to.
Trapping Gophers
Trapping is the final method for getting rid of gophers in your yard. This often will result in killing the gophers, but it may be the only solution if other controls fail.
Traps designed specifically for gophers are available commercially. They should be placed right in the gopher hole, at the bottom of the hole. Make sure you set the trap in an active burrow, which you can find by using a gopher probe. Push the probe slowly down through the soil about 8 to 12 inches away from an existing mound, testing carefully in a circle until you hit the tunnel. You can tell where the burrow is because you will hit a pocket of no resistance, where the probe suddenly drops a few inches.
Solar Powered Gopher Repellent
Do these solar powered gopher repellers really work? According to this customer review at Clean Air Gardening, they do.
“Few months ago, I bought a couple of your sonic gopher chasers, out of sheer desperation, as I had tried everything else..from poisoning to shooting the critters and nothing worked. Nothing. These electronic sonic things did the trick…almost immediately…like two days, and after that not a sign of them…the ‘sonics’ are still in place, and chirping away every thirty seconds….they gonna stay there till they quit, then I’m coming back for more. Love these things.”
Want to learn more about getting rid of gophers?
Check out these Web sites chosen by us for more information on the subject.
The Washington State Fish & Wildlife Department has a guide to pocket gophers.
Trapping pocket gophers is detailed here by the University of California’s Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program.
Check out The Colorado State University Extension’s advice on gopher management.
Kim Slotterback-Hoyum is a Michigan-based freelance writer. She has been a proofreader, writer, reporter and editor at monthly, weekly and daily publications for five years. She has a Bachelor of Science in writing and minor in journalism from Northern Michigan University. Besides writing, her interests include gardening, traveling and reading.
Where can you get the sonic?
Gophers have voracious appetites and can steal a favorite vegetable or decorative plant while you watch. The networks of tunnels that gophers and moles dig can undermine your garden or lawn. Of the various eradication methods used, some are dangerous, some cruel and some simply ineffective. Perhaps the best gopher deterrent is to line your plant boxes with gopher wire so the pesky scavengers can’t get to your plants, but that won’t save the unprotected parts of your garden. A combination of methods may convince the gophers and moles to leave, but you may have to get tough.
When I installed pavers for my courtyard I’ve encountered what I thought was a gopher or ground squirrel, but turns out they’re voles, related to lemmings. I’ve tried MoleMax which is supposed to work on voles too, but I’m not having good luck so far. I need to put some plants in the ground before winter so I’ll need to really make sure I can keep the critters out. They’re also loosening the soil underneath my new pavers, making them a little rocky.
Exclusion works, so barriers like gopher baskets and high-quality gopher wire helps tremendously.
Plant selection is the most humane route to follow. It takes research with trial & error to discover what gophers dislike.
Cats & dogs with a rodent hunting temperament are a great benefit. I feed a neighbor’s cat to encourage its interest in my yard. LOL.
Being hyper-vigilant to soil changes like new tunnels, feeding holes and new mounds limit gophers from establishing a well developed network of sleeping, storage and breeding cavities underground. Rodents don’t like change, so keep ‘em disturbed.
Develop a Zen-like attitude of acceptance about their presence, they were likely here before we were. But limiting their comfort (and their habitat) in your garden can be done.
Planting heavily with seed instead of more expensive gallon containers seems to mitigate some of the heartbreak of prized plant loss.
Trapping works as a last resort. It takes time to develop trapping skills but can be effective. It’s vutally important to protect pets against any risky eradication techniques.
Many online resources, chemical and mechanical deterrents are on the market
and available.
Some gardeners are forced to become Gopher Hunters and I find a multiple-faced approach to the challenge is necessary. If you give up like my neighbor has, your garden may become a wasteland if dispair.
The struggle is real. The rewards of a gopher-limited garden are great.
Note: a gopher-free garden is not a possibility for many of us, so resistance with a dose of acceptance is a good path forward. 🙂
Rick
Never yield to the gopher! You are in command! Trap that son-of-a-gun and throw him on the grill. Not too bad medium rare!
Ugly. Just stick him back in the hole for burial. His neighbors don’t like it.
Only persistence is omnipotent.