Moles

My yard in North Carolina is a mass of mole hills. Anyone know a way to keep them out? I'm new to the area and moles are new to me!

Cats are a big help! I got rid of mine by getting rid of their food source .. grubs in the ground and going out and stomping on their tunnels every morning.

X

I've got dogs - they don't seem to help. I stomp on the tunnels constantly. How did you get rid of the grubs?

By applying triazide (sp?) on the lawn every 3 weeks from May - July. I really hated poisoning the lawn, but between the moles and the mole crickets I was getting desperate.

X

Hi cyndie - I can vouch for what X said. My folks live in western NC and had a bad mole problem and used that same solution and it worked. Prior to that they had tried just about everything else and were at their wit's end. We also have tunneling creatures in our yard too, but I don't think they are moles (I could be wrong). Here is a picture of our critter holes. We haven't landscaped any of these areas yet so I'm not sure how we're going to handle it ourselves when the time comes. Good luck!

Lisa

Is triazide the brand name and is it a product designed to kill grubs? We've treated once for grubs, and I really had thought the tunnels had decreased when I spotted a VOLE. Nasty rodents are probably the reason my Asiatic lilies were no-shows this year. They're pretty fearless too because the other night I went out to move the sprinkler, and one scurried right by me. I think he was taunting me!

I bought some rat poison, but I have to dig holes for the poison right beside or in the tunnel, and now I'm having trouble finding the tunnels. I definitely want to dig the hole deep enough that the birds don't peck at the pellets. This is the first year in several that I haven't grown castor bean plants, but I'll have them again next summer, believe me. Sometimes I think there's a blinking neon sign in my yard visible only to animals that says "All You Can Eat"...

Triazide kills everything. That's why I use it only when necessary. To get rid of the food source for moles & voles, you have to treat your lawn every 3 weeks for 3 months to get the whole insect cycle.

X

We have moles and do nothing about them. In some places, it feels like you're walking on a huge sponge. We just decided not to mind it. Our cats occasionally catch one. We haven't noticed a lot of damage to our plants.

There are several ways of dealing with moles (and gophers). Milky spore bacteria and beneficial nematodes are the best because they will get rid of the grubs that moles feed on. Gophers, on the other hand, will eat your bulbs and the roots of your plants - they especially seem to love hostas. You can try flooding the mole/gopher tunnels with water and traps are only effective if properly placed.

Another easy method is to apply granular castor oil which is relatively inexpensive and doesn't actually harm the moles/gophers but sends them running to other areas because they do not like the scent. Apply 1 pound per 1000 sq ft and try to spread it evenly through the yard. If you use a broadcast spreader, set it to the lowest setting. You can either water it in with a hose or wait for rain to soak it into the ground - it starts working immediately and the moles should begin moving in a few hours. Re-apply the castor oil pellets as needed to keep the moles out of your yard.

Don't tell your neighbors that you moved the moles out of your yard and into their yards... they may not like that but at least your yard will be mole and gopher free.

Where do you get the granular castor oil? I'm getting lots of similar-looking holes in my garden beds; was blaming the chipmunks, but am beginning to think moles or voles after reading this thread.

II have been reading about so many people having trouble with moles that I think I have a new business I could go into. I have a little spaniel mix. While she has not been successful climbing trees to rid me of an over abundance of squirrels, she is a dynamite mole getter!

I don’t have moles but a good friend of mine does. When I visit I take Mollie (she is the dog, I am the B for Beth) and she goes wild tracking, digging and coming back proudly with a mole! I have no idea where or why she has this ability. Perhaps I should consider renting her out. It beats coming out of retirement! And she is a LOT younger than I am!

You can get the granular castor oil from most home improvement/garden center stores (Lowes, WalMart, etc). You may have to purchase a brandname product like Bonide's 'MoleMax' even though I prefer Dr. T's Nature Products ('Mole Out' and 'Snake Away'). You can read more about Dr. T's Nature Products at http://www.animalrepellents.com/products.html

or just the Mole Out page: http://www.animalrepellents.com/moleout.html

They have a great informational section on moles/voles/gophers - and how to tell the difference in the type of pest you have in your yard. The link is http://www.animalrepellents.com/mole_info.html

Even though Mole Out is labelled for moles, it works for gophers and actually is fairly effective for most small furry animals (rabbits, skunks, etc). You can buy Mole Out or MoleMax online for $12-$14 for 5 lbs - depending on who you order it from (just type either product name into a search engine and look for the best price). If you want larger sizes, I would get it from a local home improvement store because shipping could be costly ordering 10 or 25 lbs containers of Mole Out online.

I would encourage people to avoid assuming that if you have a bunch of little holes and tunnels in your yard it means that you have animals damaging your plants. We have holes and tunnels near plantings with bulbs and hostas, and yet the plants thrive. Don't go around killing little creatures unnecessarily.

I'm lucky - I have a serial killer cat ( yes, he gets fed) who marks and patrols my yard and my neighbor's yard for free. It's the organic way to control moles, voles, rabbits, snakes and all sorts of unwanted pests without harming the environment. If only he had an appetite for Japanese beetles.....

missgarney - the granular castor oil I recommended doesnt kill the animals, it just repels them out of the treated area (and chases them into your neighbors yards).

Michael--that's better. Do you know if cats are repelled by it? I used to keep squirrels out of my window boxes with cayenne pepper. The problem was you had to apply it very frequently, but it did work.

MichaelsNursery, when you say "gophers" do you mean the same pest as voles?

carolinablue, as I mentioned in my post, my dog goes after moles like crazy. They are in a neighbor’s yard and she seems to know just where to get them - and it is not always where there is a hole. I agree with missgarney that not all holes have anything to do with moles. Mollie, the dog, just has this natural instinct to do this. Now I have trained her to chase the squirrels off my bird feeders, sliding screen door, climbing up my cedar shingles, etc. But she never catches them and comes back looking as though she has really let me down so I have quit opening the door and yelling "Get the squirrel." She just can't climb those trees! She is more of a slow tracker than a chaser. I figure this is a form of natural selection. I just never knew the squirrels were so far up the ladder! They have overrun my yard and chased off all by beautiful birds. These are snooty squirrels since I have 7 different types of oak trees and two different kinds of hickory. They do not lack for natural food in my woods but they only want my birdseed and to glare in my windows at me.

Somehow I am going to work my way up the food chain so that the rodents don't do me in! :)

We visited Brevard NC recently and noted with interest the white squirrels they have there. They are truly white, not albino, and actually have a grayish stripe down their backs. I do not like them any more than I do the brownish-gray ones we have here. In fact, I thought they were pretty ugly, they looked dirty; you just can't keep a white coat clean. The black ones up in Michigan are relatively handsome.

missgarney - Yes, I have seen the Brevard, NC white squirrels. I used to go up there quite often and I found them charming. But that was before I became overrun with squirrels here. I have lived in this house since 1992 and it has only been in the last 3 or 4 years that they have gotten so bad. The last two years have been the worst! Just last week I found out that they had gotten into my crawl space and have eaten almost entirely through my air conditioning duct work. I have made some jokes about ridding my yard of them because I am upset about losing so many of my birds. Well, now I am out for blood! I am told that I must share my planet with all forms of life - some one better tell that particular form of life that it had better learn to share with others! :)

A neighbor of ours in KY, where we used to live, had squirrels coming into her house somehow under the eaves...she just couldn't understand why they didn't come into our house through the open and unscreened skylight in the roof, just next door!

They are true pests when they are too numerous. We live in the middle of acres and acres of woods, adjacent to a national forest. There are millions of oak trees, but squirrels are much less bothersome than in the urban neighborhood we inhabited in KY. There, the streets were lined with mature oaks and it seemed each one supported a breeding pair. Anyway, here there are many more trees, oak and hickory especially, and we see and hear squirrels, but they don't bother us. They have their forest, so there is no need.

missgarney, that is what I don't get. I own 3.6 acres. Less than half an acre of it is lawn. The rest is natural woods that I leave strictly alone. I had begun toward working for my Wildlife habit certification so had to do a survey of what I had. I counted 6 different types of oak trees and two different types of hickory plus numerous berry and seed-bearing shrubs. So why they insist on invading my yard I don't know. I might add that I have no immediate neighbors and all the neigboring property in undeveloped and natural woods. There is something here I am missing but so far no one can figure it out - including local pest control services and the county extension.

Getting back to the original topic of moles (and voles) may have some relevance to the squirrel problem. We have a terrible vole problem in our vegetable garden. We have not yet found a solution for eliminating them around edible products, but we may have found one cause. Our vegetable garden is in a clearing in the midst of a wild rose thicket. When we buried hardware cloth two feet up and down around the fence around the garden, we must have trapped some voles inside the garden so that is our current problem. In the process we learned why our garden has voles while others do not.

Natural preditors such as hawks and other birds like to eat voles so the voles will not travel across open lawn or fields because they know they are defenseless in the open. So it appears that they feel safe going from the rose thicket to the vegetable garden. We also removed mulch from around the outside of the garden because the mulch provided an easy way to tunnel to the garden. I don't know if this has any bearing on the squirrel problem, but if you have very little lawn or open area, perhaps the squirrels feel safer on your property than on your neighbors. Just a guess.

For more on moles/voles, see http://davesgarden.com/forums/t/209280/ .

Mollie B55- I would NOT like to have squirrels in any part of my house. And they have damaged the ductwork? Is it foamboard? They must use if for nesting material. Has anyone been able to hazard a guess as to why they prefer your house to the woods, where they belong? You have to make it less hospitable for them, somehow....a squirrel-hating dog, perhaps?

We were all amazed when a squirrel gnawed off a significant portion of a heavy MARBLE ashtray my father put on top of the lid of a container of bird seed on their deck. Their teeth must be incredibly sharp and hard.

Mollie, after squirrels got into my next-door neighbor's attic, he purchased an animal trap which he baits. He then takes the trapped squirrels several miles away and releases them. It has made a tremendous difference with our bird feeders!

Incidentally, since my earlier post about placing poison pellets into the mole/vole hills, I've discovered that the critters won't return to that spot. I admit I've spent quite a lot of time painstakingly seeking out the latest evidence of the tunneling rodents and spooning the pellets carefully in each one. I confess to a certain amount of heartlessness after my Asiatic lilies completely disappeared earlier this Summer!

Fleurs, "heartlessness", maybe. I do consider myself a devoted gardener, but I draw the line at times in the competition between animals and plants. As long as you don't get to the point at which you would cheer when Bambi's mother is shot, you probably still have some feeling left.