California Plants

After extensive research how to keep gophers and moles out of our garden, we have a favorite technique to keep them out of our vegetables. Normally, these techniques can be used to get rid of gophers and moles:

- One can use a mole trap or gopher trap
- A solar device with a high pitched noise can be used
- A gopher trap or mole trap can be used
- A gopher probe can be used
- Control for gophers can be used without poisons
- Gopher bait or mole bait can be used
- A wire mesh / chicken wire can be used

In your garden, you may find one of the above techniques suits you better than another. For our plants in the regular garden, we choose from the items above. For our vegetables, we choose to ensure a whole area is gopher and mole proof. To do this, we build a box that they cannot get in and plant the vegetables with high density gardening. The box below cost less than $50 to build and fill with excellent soil.

To build this we went to the local hardware store and got wood, screws, nails, and wire mesh. The idea here is to have a rectangular box that has mesh attached securely to the bottom. The box in the photos below is 4 x 8 feet. This is done with two 2 x 4’s that are not cut, and one cut in half. Three long screws are used to hold each corner together. Short nails or staples (we used nails) can be used to attach the wire mesh to the bottom of the wood rectangle structure. As the mesh we used was 2 feet wide, we wired two rolls of mesh together and unrolled them while attaching together.

To attach the mesh to the wood, we used a small nail, hammered it in 2/3 of the way to hold a section of the mesh to the wood, and then hammer and bend the nail to secure that piece of mesh from moving. Then five inches over would be the next nail. This particular mesh is coated with vinyl so will hopefully not rust for a long time. Because the metal mesh coated with vinyl has very small squares, a mole or gopher cannot chew or crawl through the mesh. At worst, a gopher or mole may chew roots of vegetables that are below the wire mesh.

Vegetable box built not to let gophers or moles in

In the below photo you can see the two sets of wire mesh are stitched together. We used small pieces of wire every two inches, twist tied, to attach the two rolls of wire mesh to each other.

A closeup of the corner of the box built not to let in gophers or moles

In the below photo it can be seen that we have three screws holding the 2×4’s together. Before we put in the screws, we drilled holes most of the way so that the wood would not split when we put in the screws. The soil we used to fill this up was 3/4 compost and 1/4 manure. If seeds are being planted in the soil, then the top half of the soil should not have manure mixed. This is what we did, mixing the bottom half with the manure and the top half being just bagged compost. Since this compost is from a store like Home Depot or Lowes, it is composted of quite a bit of ground wood which will take time to break down. The wood will take some nitrogen from the vegetables as they grow, so we will use an organic fertilizer and top dress with a bit of composted manure when plants are all sprouted and doing well. Here is better compost. This resource tells all about composting.

The box has been placed cage side down and filled with soil

Once this box is growing vegetables, we will post updates.

Or, one can just give up on getting rid of gophers and celebrate them. Here is one item that can be used to dance with them and celebrate them. I suppose this could be given as a joke to a friend with a gopher problem.