#$@#$@#$% Voles!!!
 

Last year I built a caged-off area to protect lettuce and kale from rabbits. And what showed up? VOLES! All of my Boston lettuce from seed ruined. Every Kale ruined pea plants ruined. Something also bit through my cucumber plants about 6-inches up the stem, without eating the plant...just chewed through (not cutworms, definitely voles or rabbits). How can I prevent and kill these little jerks?

And on another note I put my tomato plants in a few weeks early, dodged a bullet with a frosty night, and everything is 3-4 weeks ahead of last year's horrid weather...but already seeing signs of foliage disease...ugh. Maybe I should just get out the lawn mower and use that on the garden and forget about the whole thing.

Voles
 

Voles are easy to poison. You can use gopher poison. I have a tool that pushes through a few inches of soil into a gopher tunnel and a little crank drops about a teaspoon of bait into the tunnel. Voles leave small open holes. You can see them easily if the grass or growth is not high. Just drop a few pellets into the holes and they will be gone.

In my part of California we have pocket gophers and Bambi. Bambi gets an electric fence and every tomato plant gets planted in a gopher basket of galvanized chicken wire or hardware cloth. I have it down to a science where planting is (fairly) easy, getting ready for the next year, not so much, 'cuz I have to dig the gopher baskets up. The whole thing about the warm blood pests is designing something that guarantees exclusion and using it every year. With the drought here and my baskets the gophers are starving to death and the deer are moving to greener pastures. Good.

[QUOTE=Anthony_Toronto;478315]Last year I built a caged-off area to protect lettuce and kale from rabbits. And what showed up? VOLES! All of my Boston lettuce from seed ruined. Every Kale ruined pea plants ruined. Something also bit through my cucumber plants about 6-inches up the stem, without eating the plant...just chewed through (not cutworms, definitely voles or rabbits). How can I prevent and kill these little jerks?

And on another note I put my tomato plants in a few weeks early, dodged a bullet with a frosty night, and everything is 3-4 weeks ahead of last year's horrid weather...but already seeing signs of foliage disease...ugh. Maybe I should just get out the lawn mower and use that on the garden and forget about the whole thing.[/QUOTE]

Anthony,
I lost three gardens this spring before I finally figured out my problem is voles too. Some members here helped me out a lot. I now have everything surrounded by 1/4" landscaping fabric (made out of wire). I also have the landscaping fabric covered by a netting to keep out the squirrels. I'm using a bait station with poison that I move around every few days.
According to my university extension, the vole population can expand and contract. At its highest population, there can be 500 voles per 1/4 acre. Ick!
When I thought I had everything secure, I just put out one plant as an experiment to see if the voles would be excluded before I replanted the whole thing. Now my garden is growing and nothing has been eaten.....yet.
Good luck!
Holly

Thanks all for the replies.

Last year they didn't touch the lettuce, not a single bite, only the peas and kale. Bunnies nibbled on some of the lettuce but generally didn't ruin any. I don't think anything killed the cukes last year except early cool weather, so after babysitting them through plant-out a few weeks early and getting them fully established I'm really annoyed that something just nibbled the stems in half 6-inches off the ground and didn't even eat anything.

I set up the caged-off area to keep the bunnies out, so was stumped last year when things started getting eaten, and then discovered the voles. That also explained why some of my hosta and other bulbs disappeared over the prior winter. But the cage was done with chicken wire, and the voles are strolling right through the holes in it (not burrowing under...so I'll either add a layer of smaller gauge fencing or some landscape fabric and see what happens.

As for poison, I'm a little wary about putting poison in my veggie garden. I will however be removing any extraneous cover close to the garden, and will be trimming the grass as tight as I can at the garden edges where they tend to run, so cats and haws will have free-reign to eat these little jerks. Normally I allow for some donations to nature, I love animals and love seeing them around, but voles being able to give birth at 33 days of age? My garden can't compete with that.

At least they seem to have chased off the shrews that I had for several years prior, eating all of the garden worms and eating every single worm in my composters.

We have these critters running around at work in the Arctic.
I was talking to a guy the other day and out of the corner of my eye one ran along the wall and out the door.
It turned out to be their pet.
It gets the very best of treats.
Dried banana chips granola you name it.:yes:
It reminded me of the little mouse in The Green Mile story.
We had one that came out at break time and lunch every day.
Worth

I had a bad infestation of them in my yard several years ago but my pack of miniature dachshunds took care of them in a few weeks. They would dig them up and bring them to the back door and drop them off for me. All I had to do was put them in the trash. I don't know how the dogs could tell where they were under the ground but they could zero in on them very quickly. I guess they could smell them or something but it was amazing to watch. I had a hard time getting them to come in the house they were having such a good time catching voles.

Bill