How to Get Rid of Gophers

Hi, I'm Tricia, an organic gardener. I grow organically for a healthy and safe food supply, for a clean and sustainable environment, for an enjoyable and rewarding experience. Gophers can be a serious and frustrating pest and the first step is monitoring to make sure that you actually do have gophers and not moles, voles or ground squirrels. If you have gophers you will see a distinctive crescent or horseshoe shaped mound with a plugged tunnel. In rocky or clay soil you may not see a distinctive mound but you will see the hole that's been filled back in. Once you verify that you do have gophers you can control with an integrated pest management system. IPM starts with prevention. Keep the borders of your garden weed free. Gophers are a lot less likely to travel into your garden if there's no food on the way. The next step is avoidance. If you already have gophers in your yard the way you can get them to not eat your plants is to lay down gopher wire at the bottom of your beds or plant your plants within gopher baskets. For trees make sure that you only use the fifteen gallon tree basket. Unlike the gopher wire or the other baskets this basket is designed to break down and degrade after just a couple years so that it doesn't girdle the tree roots. Along with avoidance you want to suppress the population of gophers and the easiest and most reliable way to do that is with trapping. Trapping is most effective when you can find the main burrow. So get a stick or use a tool like this. Starting at the freshest mound you want to probe eight to twelve inches from the side of the mound where the plug is. The burrow will be located six to twelve inches deep. You'll notice a sudden drop of about two inches when you hit the burrow. So first you want to open up the plug and I like doing that with this Hori Hori Weeder. And this is where you're going to put the trap. This cinch trap is great for the opening. Insert the trap six to eight inches into the tunnel. You can either plug the tunnel again or leave it open. Where you located the main burrow open a hole with the Hori Hori. We're going to set two traps down in that burrow. I like these Victor easy set traps. But first I'm going to tie a string around the trap so that I can pull it out and check it. The additional traps should be set facing opposite directions in the main burrow. Check your traps in the morning and evening. If the traps have not been visited within forty eight hours move the traps. Make sure to attach these type of traps to a stake. That way you can locate them and remove them easily. In addition to trapping you can put up barn owl nesting boxes. Barn owls can help reduce the population over time but they're not a quick fix and will not eradicate gophers from any one area. If you have a large area and are willing to take the time training a terrier to hunt gophers is an effective control. If your gopher problem persists IPM does take it to the next level but these control measures are usually not organic. So you have to make the decision how far you want to go to control the gophers. This gopher tool can be used to apply natural poisons deep inside the burrows. Never apply natural or any other poisons to the surface of the soil. Even the teeniest tiniest little grain can kill a songbird. Be aware that there's a good chance of secondary poisoning of an animal that would eat a poisoned gopher such as pets or birds of prey. You can also fumigate with these gopher gassers but university research shows that they're not quite as effective because the gophers will close up their tunnel to avoid the gas. But there's no secondary poisoning worries there. Well I've told you what you can do to control your gophers and now I want to tell you what doesn't work. According to UC Davis ineffective controls include chewing gum, laxatives, repellents of all kinds, plants like gopher purge and scare devices. Once you've solved your gopher problems clean up all the mounds and come back and monitor to make sure that they haven't returned. So get your gophers and go organic for life!