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Post by Gianna on Jul 11, 2019 9:07:57 GMT -5
There is a lot of areas in my area where the gophers happily live. It's generally dry here, so a nice moist garden area, with improved soil, looks like Shangrila to gopher pests. Can't blame them, but they can do a lot of damage. And often you cant tell they are there until they eat the roots of something, and it wilts, then dies. They can be trapped, but here there are so many of them, and unless you trap constantly, they just keep coming in from neighboring dry areas. Sometimes snakes can help control the population. There was a lovely gopher snake in the front last week...
But yesterday, there were signs of gopher activity - piles of loose soil - in one of the pepper beds. It's difficult digging around without damaging the roots too. So yesterday, I started probing the soil with a thin stake hoping to find a run outside the pepper bed. And I did. Found what seemed a good, clean run about a foot from the loose dirt, and set a trap. And this morning I checked and had killed one. I put in another trap in the same run. Sometimes you will get a second one.
I love these traps - best I've ever used. Gophinators I think. They are stainless steel, and while they are slightly difficult to set requiring hand-strength, they are easy to place, cover, and they kill very effectively.
So, round one, the pepper bed wins.
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Post by spacecase0 on Jul 11, 2019 10:53:32 GMT -5
I usually have a huge problem with gophers.
traps are the only way I can get them. I use to trap only when I had issues, but this year I started trapping before I planted anything, and that worked quite well
I looked into what large farms do around here, and they use traps. I think why home gardeners have a hard time with it. The area is to small, large farms only have to defend the boarders, gophers rarely get 30 foot past the fence line before being caught. so they have a large internal area where there is none. Home gardens are often small and you basically have the same distance to defend, but that means you have no safe spaces in the garden as they are less than 60 foot across.
I eventually converted half my garden to raised beds with 1/2" hardware cloth under them. the other half is my corn plot. In the corn plot I let a low growing succulent grow it helps the corn grow, the gophers don't like the corn much, but they love the succulent. so I usually catch them before they hurt any corn.
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Post by brownrexx on Jul 12, 2019 7:08:29 GMT -5
Gianna, When you say gophers, how big are they? I think that gophers in CA are different that I imagine. To me a gopher is a little thing like a gerbil or chipmunk. Maybe they are called pocket gophers. We don't have gophers in PA, just moles which eat insects and voles who eat the roots of plants, bulbs, potatoes, etc. Moles and voles are the size of large mice.
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Post by paulf on Jul 12, 2019 9:13:48 GMT -5
No gopher problem here either. My son in Iowa City has the brownrexx version that they call ground squirrels and he has several colonies in his yard. They are also called "Grinnies" by the locals.
This from the Iowa State Extension:
If they are small, brown, furry and crawl on the ground, most people tend to lump these mammal species under "gopher" or some other all-encompassing name. Different species have different requirements for food and shelter. Understanding those differences can help you manage their populations.
Ground Squirrels The 13-lined ground squirrels are those six-inch long (plus about three to four inches of tail) critters of open grassland areas. Once uncommon in Iowa, they are now abundant across the state as we have created "short-grass prairie" areas in the form of mowed lawns, pastures, golf courses and cemeteries. They like the changes we've brought to the landscape. They hibernate for about five winter months, emerging in March to early April. They burrow in the ground in open, short-grass areas, leaving little visible dirt and holes the size of 50-cent pieces.
Chipmunks The eastern chipmunk is the same size as the ground squirrel, but is found in more woodland or woodland edge habitat and has only two light stripes. Absent only from the northwest corner of Iowa, they inhabit neighborhoods with mature trees and shrubs, rock and wood piles and retaining walls. While they may live in holes dug in the ground, they are more likely to live in the retaining walls, beneath decks or even in holes in trees. They do not hibernate in the winter and, though they sleep for days at a time, can be seen raiding bird feeders on warm winter days.
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Post by Hensaplenty on Jul 13, 2019 17:51:19 GMT -5
We have gophers two doors down. Hope they don't try to expand in my yard. I battle chipmunks here. Last house was voles. Ugh....
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Post by paquebot on Jul 13, 2019 20:42:45 GMT -5
There was a singe 13-line gopher in my lawn for 3 years. No idea where it came from and never had a mate. Somehow managed to elude the neighbor's cats. Never bothered anything. Farmers not happy with them at corn planting time. The gophers will dig up the kernels. One farmer that I know will take several ears of corn and walk along the edge of the fields and sprinkle some kernels. That keeps the gophers busy until the corn emerges.
Martin
The truth is more important than the facts.
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Post by Gianna on Jul 14, 2019 8:34:17 GMT -5
Gianna , When you say gophers, how big are they? I think that gophers in CA are different that I imagine. To me a gopher is a little thing like a gerbil or chipmunk. Maybe they are called pocket gophers. We don't have gophers in PA, just moles which eat insects and voles who eat the roots of plants, bulbs, potatoes, etc. Moles and voles are the size of large mice. Our gophers (pocket gophers, though there are many subspecies) are on average 6 inches long when mature, and about 2 to 3 inches wide. Some mature males can reach 10 inches, but that is not that common. A gopher-trapping friend once called with great excitement - she had trapped a massive 12 incher. I dont know how common these larger ones are however, since the size and type of trap might influence the size of animal that can be caught. With the 'new' sleek stainless steel gophinator traps that are easier to push back further into the run, I think larger ones can be caught. The old box traps (or disgusting macabees) to some extent might have limited the size of the animal 'willing' to enter the 'trapping zone'. Just a guess. Our gophers are underground 95% of the time. Another guess. They will venture out to eat something near-by, but only at night, and not that commonly. And they undoubtedly go cross country sometimes to invade new territory. Their legs are short and I suspect more geared to digging than running, and they'd be easy prey to owls, hawks, etc. Years ago I had been bringing up some lovely topsoil to the property - 5 gallon container at a time - and had amassed a large pile on top of the concrete driveway. After it rained, some lovely weeds began to grow in the soil. A gopher decided that would be a nice place to live, so he had to have come on top of the ground and then burrowed in and lived there for part of a season. He left of his own accord after the lush weeds ran out. When our gophers eat, they can do great damage. Depending on the plant, they can and will eat entire root systems. You come out in the morning and see a precious garden plant leaning to the side, and wilted. You lift it up, and there are zero roots left, with just gnawed marks like a beaver in what is left of the stem. Ground sharks. They often will also, when eating, pull a smaller plant down into their borrows and eat the stem as they pull it down. You can sometimes see a plant moving (twitching) on a still day, and think a gopher is eating it from the bottom. And it often is. You can tell when there are gophers present by the fluffy piles of dirt on the surface as they dig tunnels. Occasionally you can see a gopher working as he pushes the soil up. They are kinda cute. While dogs are very effective in deterring gophers (or so I've heard), cats are pretty worthless. In all my combined garden and cat years there has been only one cat who caught one gopher. And this cat was so excited it could hardly breathe. But these were pampered not hungry house cats. I however did have one cat who was excellent at telling me where a gopher was active. A nice tabby. I often knew when he was lying in the yard to look in that area for possible gopher activity. He never caught one, but it was usually a good place to set the traps.
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Post by brownrexx on Jul 14, 2019 11:44:36 GMT -5
Gianna, I have never seen a gopher except in pictures but they sound very destructive. One time on another forum a poster showed where gopher holes were in the community garden. Wow, those holes were huge and the gophers were the side of our groundhogs which are the size of small dogs or really big cats. I am glad that you don't have those! I did see ground squirrels in Arizona and they were sort of like gerbils or chipmunks but I'll bet that gardeners don't like them either. I did think that they were really cute.
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Post by spacecase0 on Jul 15, 2019 8:35:14 GMT -5
I have the pocket gophers here, have had them eat the roots and up the stem up a few inches of a walnut tree that had a one inch diameter trunk. with things like sunflowers, squash, potatoes, tomatoes, watermelons and other soft things they will eat all the roots and the entire plant as they pull it underground.
I usually trap 30 to 50 (sometimes more) a year in my garden. the cats love eating them, but they don't like going in the garden to catch them, I think the garden fence freaks them out a bit.
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Post by Gianna on Jul 15, 2019 17:01:59 GMT -5
I have a friend who traps gophers, and keeps track of the numbers. After a few years when he reached 500, his grand kids gave him a party. Gophers can be extremely destructive. I used to grow roses. They seemed to really like the root systems and just started at one end of a row, and ate their way to the end. Trapping, wire cages... nothing deterred them. It was moist ground, 'tasty' roots, surrounded by the native dry environment. Can't really blame them. I really enjoyed my roses and had a nice collection, but in the end it was just not worth the angst of which one was next...
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Post by spacecase0 on Jul 17, 2019 0:12:47 GMT -5
you remind me, the gophers here will chew through wire cages...
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