Hard Work for a little Problem

Our weather forecast for today and tomorrow is wind and heavy rain. I'll be in the grow room trimming my leeks and onions and planting eggplants. I am trying these this year.

I have never had good luck with Eggplant. Usually my problem is flea beetles. But then I learned that Eggplant is self pollinating, so it can remain under row cover and be protected from flea beetles and other pests.

I tried the row cover last year, but a pest got under the row cover. Actually, under the eggplant.  One morning my eggplants were blooming and looking healthy. The next day, the entire plant was gone. Gone into a hole. The vole got it.

 

 Moles are destructive in that they make tunnels and disturb plants roots. But they only eat grubs and worms. Moles are larger than mice and have that star-shaped nose. 

Voles, or field mice, are herbivores. They eat grain, seeds and pretty much anything else that is plant related.  They are so much worse for a gardener. Voles look like mice, only they are a little bit larger, have a more rounded head and a short tail, like the farmer's wife chopped a mouse's tail in half with a carving knife.

 

Voles tunnel underground or use mole tunnels. They come up at night and leave a small dime sized hole as evidence. Last year we tried different methods to rid ourselves of voles. Hav-a-heart Traps failed. Mouse traps in an over-turned pot over the hole failed. Vole deterrent pellets failed (but smelled really good). Castor oil failed. So we began the arduous task of removing all the dirt from our raised beds and installing hardware cloth. This is not only a lot of work, it's costly.

 We did quite a few beds last year and took advantage of the occasional nice days we had in February to do a few more.  All the dirt gets removed, hardware cloth is stapled all around, leaving no openings for the voles. This has worked in all the boxes we have done this in. My hubby wonders why the voles don't climb up and over the boxes. I am not sure why, but they don't.  We are using 1/2 inch hardware cloth that is 19 gauge. Voles can chew through thinner wire, so you have to be careful of the gauge. They can fit through 1 inch hardware cloth so you don't want to use that. We get our hardware cloth at Lowes.  As you can see, it doesn't fit the boxes. We piece it together so we don't waste any of it.

Yesterday we started a second bed and ran out of the hardware cloth. This morning I found that the voles had tried to get in. (They found the edge of the hardware cloth and did get in. They are after birdseed that the birds have been flinging from our back yard feeder. The feeder needs to be moved!)

The voles are costing us a fortune. We are going to reconfigure our larger beds because to vole proof from the edges of the bed would involve digging down almost three feet to install hardware cloth to prevent them from getting into the 8 x 8 beds. So we will be ripping out the two year old beds, building new beds with hardware cloth attached and reinstalling them.  So much work!!!

Hellebore in bloom in February - voles do not eat them - but neither do humans

Daffodils coming up behind puppy - voles don't eat them - but neither do humans.