In all the years that I lived here, I have never had issues with woodchucks.
My neighbor next door had practically all of her garden decimated and it appears in my yard daily. My neighbor said to use Juicy Fruit chewing gum and that supposedly will kill them. I put out near their hole several pieces which have disappeared, however, they were in my yard again this morning. In the meantime, if anyone has any other means of ridding them I'd certainly appreciate any advice. I think ultimately I will have to resort to an exterminator to trap them.

Please don't get this the wrong way, but I am laughing tears visualizing a bunch of Woodchucks standing around chewing gum while discussing this particular flavor.

I am not of help here, if you really can't live with them, relocation might be your best bet. Personally, I cage everything plant related that is dear to me.

I truly suspected my post would bring about a chuckle or 2. However, I took the advice from the neighbor who happens to be "off the boat" from Italy whose garden had all the damage whose sister had passed on the info about the Juicy Fruit and it absolutely had to be nothing but the Juicy Fruit brand.

There are all sorts of remedies for those critturs, not just woodchucks, but also the torch and pitchfork hunted gophers. As far as I know, when or IF you get rid of one, others show up so you never know if the Juicy Fruit did its work or not. Caged, yes, deep wire baskets sunk into the ground to hopefully deter them from your roots and plants. I personally believe nature gives us enough of them to deal with, that killing them is ok. After all, they thought alligators were going extinct and BAM! overrun again...

I just had to look this up on line. There is no concrete evidence that this works. Supposedly it has been tried on moles, gophers and woodchucks.
Two theories prevail:
You need to place it in the entrance of their burrows and leave the foil on.
Woodchucks eat it with the tinfoil and gum wrecking havoc on their digestive tracts. But it remains an unproven remedy.
Moles are suppose to love juicy fruit. Now this is a bunch of horse hockey pucks because moles are meat eaters. And yet some fruity piece of gum is enticing to them?? Don't think so.
And gophers, they are suppose to eat it and have their insides messed up. How, nobody knows! What exactly makes people think that a gopher will just walk over and eat gum.
Then these silly believers start to suggest smushing earthworms into the gum in order to get a mole to injest it. If the gum is so darn effective, why do you have to mix in earthworms??

As an aside, I have a woodchuck and he/she has eaten nothing but weeds and plants. It doesn't bother anything else. I know where it's burrow is but I can't kill an animal who is just doing what comes natural to them.
It just seems to me that if humans are as smart as they think they are, we can come up with something better then Juicyfruit gum!!!

How about chewing tobacco??
We will hide their spittoons!!!

Funny Bill! I personally have moles, and yeah they tear up and kill plants, yards, as well as making a walking hazard for every animal walking around. Dogs and cats are happy digging after them, so there is more real estate damage. I do go by the rule, if you catch it, you clean it (kill it). I have metal fabric under my raised bed 'sleeves' and it helped not declare war on the moles.

kittriana said: I have metal fabric under my raised bed 'sleeves' and it helped not declare war on the moles.

I put ½" metal fabric under my two raised bed 'sleeves' as well, as we get gophers AND moles on our rural Central TX property. Grrrrr. The gophers are a much worse problem for us. they were well estsablished on tshe 42 acres when we bought it. I don't feel bad, as the adjacent properties on the Google map look more dotted with gopher mounds than even on ours is........for miles and miles actually.

Moles only eat bugs, worms, slugs, snails and insects. It is their burrowing/digging that tears up plant roots that get in their way on their seach for bugs. Luckily, we don't see many sign of moles, maybe one tunnel a year? So I figure the metal mesh will spare the most of my garden veggie roots from our gophers. These are new raised beds as I'm new to veggie gardening. I'm just now setting up my soil/compost in them for planting next spring, so I haven't learned if the metal mesh will be effective at saving their roots or not. Hope so.

Depends on how deep the beds are above the ground...and what plants are in there. Moles only go 4" above ground, not sure what your gophers can climb into...

I've come to the conclusion that I will be calling an exterminator. The only problem he has to trap both either mom and her offspring. I dealt with this gentleman once before and he seems the only way to go at this point in time.

I am truly sorry to read this!

Well, I would suggest that you grow "sacrificial plants" - e.g., those that could repel woodchucks from your crops. Woodchucks don't live in my area, so I am not an expert on which plant to use, but you can look this up. What I suggest you do is that you plant these on the border of your garden. When they flower, either leave the flowers to produce seed for collecting or deadhead them.

Well we don't have to deal with this problem. If they want them removed then we should support it.

Remove = relocate
hopefully that's what is implied.

I somewhat doubt there is anything you could plant around the garden to repel woodchucks... especially since they have already discovered the gardens. Wally, you might first want to try something like Safer Animal Repellant spray ("powerful groundhog repellent that contains 3 great-for-repelling-groundhogs ingredients – capsaicin, piperine, and black pepper oil. The combination of these ingredients drives woodchucks away by creating an unpleasant burning sensation."
Read more: https://pestkill.org/rodents/g...)
Otherwise, I think the exterminator might be your best course of action.

The Juicy Fruit doesn't even use the foil wrapper any more. So I improvised and used the light gauge foil and perforated the wrapper. I'll wait and see just how effective that works.
Thanks, Big Bill, maybe the aluminum will raise hell with them.

Kinda like feeding alka seltzers to seagulls, chuckl. Good luck Walter.

I recommend getting a dog.

I get Woodchucks all the time and they don't do any damage to my gardens. We live trap them and relocate them but new ones always take their place. Like I said they don't do any damage to my gardens. They like to burrow on the sides of hills or under buildings.

It has been proven by scientific study that be removing nuisance wildlife, you have a narrow window of joy.

If you have say a squirrel problem and you remove them, other squirrels will quickly discover the void you have created. So instead of you dealing with a couple of resident squirrels, you have to deal with 2, 3, or 6 other squirrels looking to fill that void.

In South Carolina it is not legal to relocate. Theory is that you may introduce disease to other wood chuck colonies. They must be destroyed. I don't think people pay attention to this rule. I put cages around. We did remove those burrowing under the house. Twice now