Gophers in the Garden

Gophers are a burrowing rodent and common garden pest in some regions. If you're dealing with gophers in the garden, we've got some solutions here to help you save your plants.

What Are Gophers?

Despite the common misconception, gophers are not related to groundhogs. Groundhogs are in the squirrel family, gophers are in the rodent family.

Groundhogs may come forage in your garden, and then retreat to a burrow somewhere else. Gophers will tunnel their way into your garden and snatch your produce from below.

Gophers may surface in your garden leaving amount of soil where they've excavated.

In mild climates like here in Tucson, gophers can have three to five litters per year. They're very prolific, so they are a particularly pernicious problem to deal with.

What Do Gophers Eat?

Gophers want your produce. They're omnivores, but they would rather eat vegetables than bugs or mammals usually.

Gophers are especially fond of root veggies, and their tunnels in your garden may allow them easy access to pull root vegetables down underground from below.

Occasionally you'll even spot your produce being sucked down underground like you're in a cartoon. Very rude!

They can do a lot of damage to your plant roots in a very short amount of time, which might set you way back on your season.

How Do I Prevent Gophers From Eating My Veggies?

Barriers

Some folks find success burying hardware cloth deep down under their soil.

I've seen cages fashioned out of hardware cloth buried a couple feet to prevent gophers access to your plant roots and tubers entirely.

Theoretically you're longer plant roots can grow right through the hardware cloth, so it's no restriction for your plants. All the while, it should protect your root crops and tubers which grow shallower than you bury the hardware cloth.

People do report that this works, but it is a ton of manual labor to do, and hardware cloth gets very expensive when you need a lot of it. I also suspect that it does still impede some of your root growth, as I think some roots are thicker than the hardware cloth grid.

Despite that, this is a great preventative measure that should give you a noticeable improvement in gopher problems if you do want to put the time and labor into implementing it.

Obviously this is something you will have to do between seasons, but might be a good investment in gopher-proofing infrastructure.

Ultrasonic Gopher Prevention

I've seen a lot of gardeners use ultrasonic gopher spikes as a deterrence.

These spikes are usually solar-powered and have a high pitched ultrasonic beep about once per minute. The beep is supposed to resonate underground and deter gophers. The idea being that their keen sense of hearing makes them susceptible to loud high pitched sounds.

From speaking with gardeners about these I understand that they "work" but they don't "work work".

Expect results better than not using them, but you will likely still have some gophers.

Instant Mashed Potatoes

I can't confirm this myself, but some gardeners claim that gophers cannot resist mashed potato flakes. Upon consuming a large enough quantity, the potato flakes should expand in the gophers stomach, killing it.

Your mileage may vary on this one, but if you've got the stomach for it (pun intended) it's an inexpensive thing to try.

Gopher Trapping

There are two types of gopher traps: live traps and dead ones.

Live traps like the Havahart two-door can be buried in a gopher tunnel to catch a critter from either side.

Dead traps like scissor mole traps will kill your gophers if you learn how to set them correctly. Just use a soil probe to locate their tunnels and find out where to place them.

As crazy as it sounds, some folks swear by Juicy Fruit gum as a gopher bait!

Gassing Gophers Out

Not for the feint-of-heart, some more gruesome ways of dealing with gophers include:

-Directing a car exhaust through some ducting into their tunnels

-Filling their tunnels with gasoline and setting it alight (not responsible if you mess this up!)

-Putting a lit flare in the tunnel, and blowing the smoke in with a leaf blower

Most of these seem absolutely cartoonish and are always included in a story about somebody's crazy uncle with a farm. They just might be crazy enough to work, though.

Some of these methods such as blowing smoke in will cause the gopher to exit the tunnels, whereby they may be dispatched upon surfacing.

Note that gophers will seal up tunnels when they detect smoke, so you'll need to identify the main tunnel rather than a side-tunnel if you want to smoke gophers out. This is where a tunnel probe comes into play.

That's all for now, good luck with your gophers. If you're looking for ways to control other garden pests naturally Check out the full guide here.