Gophers

I must have planted my fruit trees on gophercentral. I would get home and a tree would be completely wilted. I could just lift it up out of the ground. I had a lemon that was maybe 2 inches thick and it looked like I had stuck it in a pencil sharpener. There would be a fresh mound of dirt at a gopher tunnel nearby.

But I really, really, didn’t want to poison them. And I didn’t want to trap them either.  Although I did trap one :-( They are truly rather awesome animals. (I looked them up on Wikipedia.) In addition, from my own observations they’re the only animal I know that can actually run at least as fast backwards as they can forward.

But I did not want to eliminate them as a food source for the Hawks, the coyote and the Bobcat that are are around. I kept telling the gophers that I was willing to share but only share. They wouldn’t listen.

So I tried several things such as putting wire mesh under the trees but I didn’t really want the wire in the ground either.

At one of the trees, I had dug down trying to at least find out where they were coming from and had ended up digging sort of a trench along 2 sides of the tree. Well the Gophers would not cross the trench they kept trying to fill it in but it was very easy to just scoop the dirt out in the morning. They wouldn’t dig under and finally gave up.

Now let’s be clear I have on other occasions put in a barrier such as wire or concrete. Filled the dirt back in. And they just went under it almost immediately. So my assumption is that with an open trench they have nothing to follow down and go under.

So I dug a trench around a couple more of the trees. And that worked so well I have ended up digging more trenches. I guess I kind of turned into a giant gopher myself. But knock on wood I have not had a gopher attack a tree in about 6 months now. Before the “moat” I lost 10 trees. I was so bummed. But I kept telling myself it was just expensive Hawk, bobcat, and coyote food.

Okay so now its forced sharing. The Gophers have their property and I have mine. The hawks and bobcats and coyotes still have gophers to eat and I have my trees.

And there is an even better way now.