Gophers in the Garden

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Ignore the sweet face!

If you grow vegetables in the western U.S. then there is a very good chance are you are well acquainted with the Pocket Gopher, a creature that makes the average person say “ahhh” and the gardener say… well, I can’t say that here. A much smaller version of the Woodchuck, (Yikes!!!), found in the eastern U.S., the Pocket Gopher none the less wreaks havoc in your garden. If you want to get things in chronological order, you can jump over now and read about my earlier battles with this cute little devil of a pest at this link: How to Trap Gophers.  Then return here for a couple of posts summarizing this year’s battle.

First, here is a little background on how gophers came to be such a pest in my garden.  I have gardened here for 15 years.  For the first 10 of those years, we were bordered by a small commercial farmer growing vegetables for their farm stand.  Because they had 21 well irrigated acres and I had less than 2, the gophers seemed content to stay out of my garden, instead maintaining house and hearth in the farmer’s fields.  Five years ago, before the real estate market went belly up, this farmer decided they wanted to develop their land for housing.  Because a requirement of doing this is either they prove the land is not suitable for farming or that they have not farmed it for at least 3 years.  Because the land is very suitable for farming, they knew they would lose the first argument so they chose to stop farming in the hope that after 3 years they would be allowed to develop it.

What happened is that once their 21 acres was left to dry up each summer, the only irrigated land for the gophers is my garden.  Guess where some of the gophers decided to move to?  Anyway it has been an ongoing battle trying to grow vegetables without suffering huge losses from the gopher’s burrows and appetites.  In my next post I will detail some of the frustrations and recent successes I have had in this war with the little vermin.  I don’t use poisons, so I’ll have photos of the various traps I have tried, including the latest and greatest trap which saved, (I hope in time), this year’s zucchini crop.