23,948 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening

So sorry for your hassle. Raised beds and hardware cloth are working for me. Jack Russels can do more damage than the gophers!
How does an electric fence work for gophers? I have one for the above ground pests.

Given that you already have a garden (so you can't use hardware cloth) and don't want to use poison (me neither) I think your best bet is to get Macabee traps or similar from other vendors. Macabee traps are no longer made in USA, so you might as well buy whichever ones you can find readily.

Next year, use hardware cloth.

This year, go fill in all gopher holes and flatten all mounds. Then watch for new activity. As soon as you see new activity (a wilting or missing plant, a hole, or a mound) place a trap. If you find a missing or wilted plant, you can dig in that area and find the gopher tunnel leading away from the plant. It can be tricky to find it. The act of digging may partially cover the hole. Probe the sides of your hole gently with your fingers. When you find the tunnel, place a single trap in that tunnel. Stake the trap so the gopher cannot pull it farther into the tunnel. Do not use any bait. Cover the whole area with a board or something so nobody trips or sets off the trap. If you catch nothing in 48 hours, give up on that location.

In my experience, there is little or no gore. Usually the gopher is dead when I find it. The trap is not supposed to break the skin. Some people like to leave the dead gopher in the hole. They think it deters other gophers. I don't do that.

In general, clean up after the gophers so that you can readily recognize fresh activity. When you see it, don't wait. Set the trap right away. After you do it a few times, and if you keep the supplies handy (gloves, traps, stakes, and a trowel or small shovel) you can set a trap in less than 5 minutes.

You can also probe for main tunnels by randomly digging around active sites or using some kind of stick to probe. If you find a main tunnel, dig it out, and place two traps facing away from each other in the tunnel.

I have a very high success rate trapping gophers with single traps in the tunnels leading away from a plant they have destroyed. These are feeding tunnels, and they come back to see if they can continue to feed, I guess. I have seen so many gopher damaged plants, that I can spot it very quickly, before the whole plant is gone. This may be a critical part of success. Once the plant is totally gone, maybe the gopher won't revisit that hole.

Gophers are solitary except during mating season and child-rearing. Once you catch one, you are usually done at that location. Don't bother resetting the trap in the same location.

Gophers do not hibernate (it is not cold where they live). Gophers stay below ground as much as possible. Trying to eliminate them with BB guns and slingshots and such will not be effective unless you have a team of people watch the garden 24 hours a day.

Gophers DO NOT climb over small obstacles. They will not enter a raised bed if it has boards around the outside that stick up above ground, and the bottom is closed off with 1/2 inch hardware cloth. For me, galvanized hardware cloth lasts many years underground, and comes up with no rust at all. The galvanization is critical to having it hold up. There must be no gap between the hardware cloth and wood. There must be no holes in the wood (I mean, no holes big enough for a gopher to go through).

Gophers may enter a raised bed if there is dense vegetation or a dirt mound forming a ramp to the top of the board. Likewise, they do not climb over wire plant baskets which stick up out of the ground, but may get in if dirt or vegetation forms a ramp. They will happily burrow through compacted roadbed gravel or decomposed granite.

The vast majority of deterrents don't work (according to UC Davis).

Chewing gum does not work. A researcher in UC Davis fed it to captive gophers for many years.

Gophers do not spontaneously go away. If you see no activity, that does not mean they are gone unless you did something. Gophers can tunnel horizontally for a long way. The same gopher may plague both you and your neighbor. Gophers can easily burrow under sidewalks, driveways and streets.

There may be plants that gophers don't like, but I don't know which ones they are. They like all plants that you might have in a vegetable garden including garlic. They like many landscaping plants, and can kill small trees also.

Feel free to repost with or without attribution (and don't worry, I didn't copy it, it is original with me).

Red Russian also self sows very effectively. I haven't had to sow any myself for years.

I'm growing Red Russian this year. It's milder and plant more than you think because it cooks down to nothing!

Both, some of the seeds I planted beets, carrots and pots, have all sprouted, but are not growing, it has been in the 70's-80's, just a lot of rain that with the mulch is holding in all the water. That is why I though about using some peroxide solution to air things out, but I have never tried this method.

I'm in the very eastern part if Kentucky and an having the exact same problem. My lettuce is the only thing that seems to be doing well under such conditions, and I'm waiting for a dry spell before I sow any if my pepper seeds as I'm pretty sure they would just rot anyway. :/ Hope things dry up a bit for you, too!

I'm fond of little Thumbalina Zinnias - they germinate fast and stay small so you can tuck them everywhere and they start blooming really fast too. I find Marigolds to be slug magnets, so I stay away from them. I usually have some sort of flowers in all of my beds, but its more about aesthetics than companion planting. Last year I had Nasturtiums, Blue Lobelia, Impatiens, Borage, Petunias, Violas, Zinnia, Galardia, Morning Glories, and bedding Dahlias mixed in through the veg garden.

It was the same for me with sunflowers...trying to pull up tree trunks. So this year, I put the sunflowers outside the fence instead of in the garden itself. Always marigolds, some cosmos and zinnias are my go-to flowers.

UC Davis has studied gophers extensively.

Here are two URL's:

http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/QT/gopherscard.html
http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/PMG/PESTNOTES/pn7433.html

I will put one of them in the "Optional Link URL" box so that you can click on it. But you can also cut and paste the above URL's. If you want to solve the problem, read the info from UC Davis. There are a lot of commonly recommended remedies which just do not work.

Here is a link that might be useful: Gophers--UC IPM

I found this blurb in that link that the poster above linked in their message regarding pocket gopher control:
LEGAL STATUS
The California Fish and Game Code classifies pocket gophers as nongame mammals. This means if you are the owner or tenant of the premises and you find pocket gophers that are injuring growing crops or other property, including garden and landscape plants, you can control them at any time and in any legal manner.

So, knowing all that... should I wait till the buds are a bit bigger and then nip them?

JMO, ok? but I would snip them off as soon as they appear until after they are transplanted.

I agree that plants have a natural cycle built in to their genetics. So when we are trying to force them out of that natural pattern - ie: stay in your container and make more vegetative growth now rather than setting fruit now - then leaving the blooms on defeats that goal.

Sometimes I know that the plant will go ahead and drop that bloom or abort the small fruit anyway so some argue to just leave it to do what it does naturally. But if it is going to drop the blossom or abort the fruit anyway - and it would when you transplanted it - then there is no point in leaving it on the plant. Get it off ASAP and reduce the stress on the plant.

Dave

Thank you, Dave :).

The finger sized roots are very tasty!

I ordered Beiler White, Cox's Yellow Jersey, Korean Purple and Tennessee Top Mark from Sand Hill. Those plus my Red Wine Velvet should give me a good mix.
I don't want potatoes rooting everywhere... so from what I gather they can root where the vines touch the ground? Maybe I could snip unruly vines and use the leaves as greens?
Thanks for all the replies!

Abby

I vote eggs too....but I can't say I'm a reliable source, just questimating.....

Perhaps aphids.

If you could catch one in a jar or glass or something (covered) and throw it in the freezer for a little bit, you should be able to get up close shots without any problem.

Definitely not thrips.

That's all. Just some small teeth marks in the skin of the squash? Were they still small and green or ripening on the vine. The squash weren't broken open or part of them missing, no actual bites out of them? No damage to the plant itself? So you were still able to harvest them?

Reason I ask is all those points can help distinguish the culprit. Small teeth marks just on the outer skin of the squash with no real damage done often indicates mice or rats bites, maybe a ground squirrel but they usually do more damage than that IME. Baited traps work for them.

Dave

Hard to remember but I think some were damaged beyond being harvestable some could be harvested just looked weird cos already chomped on, none actually broken in half. I do find mouse poop around my outdoor picnic table so that is "evidence"

Sweet. I did not realize how it takes a few growth cycles before you can really start harvesting the asparagus. I am lucky!

Lucky you! There is nothing better than freshly harvested asparagus. It is an entirely different flavor than whatever has been sitting around the produce department. Enjoy.

There is nothing better than newly harvested lettuce with its tender crispness. It is one of the reasons I garden since I can't buy that freshness anywhere. Enjoy!

I've been harvesting spinach for a while. it's holding me over until the peas come in.