I really think that people w/critter/bug problems should read this article. Steve - see if the cloves will work for a deer/rabbit deterent? I know that most everyone here except me uses dishsoap for bugs, but the clove part is what really intrigued me. I wonder if you buried some cloves under a rose if that'd deter gophers/moles? I think I may have my mom try that!

http://garden.org/articles/vie...

I like the idea of using botanical materials in the garden. I've noticed that in a tiny corner of the garden where peppermint has nearly overgrown my roses, the roses themselves are subjected to almost no nibbling by anyone. I'm thinking it's a pretty good deal for the roses, though it doesn't make for a neat looking bed.

Right now I am using a two stage approach for deer.
1) Spraying weekly with Liquid Fence
2) Set up Contec spray heads with motion sensors to wet whatever moves. I did that today and had a couple extra showers.

The deer have yet to attack my garden this year so it must be working! ... Oh, wait, they didn't attack my garden until the second half of May last year. So I won't quite know whether it's working until the end of the season.

I'm using a two-stage approach for squirrels, too. In addition to the Liquid Fence, I'm relocating squirrels. So far I've relocated two in three days. Also a pesky desert rat that was digging up and/or eating the tops off my oriental lilies and crocus. Still setting traps for voles and pocket gophers.

Several of my roses look as healthy and happy as I've ever seen them. So I'm going to keep up the effort for a while. Tending the garden will be an obsession for me this year because I have so much new plant material there to keep happy. It's rewarding. The late daffodils are sweetly scenting the air, and some of the more established iris are blooming. No signs of rose buds yet.

I hope your ambitious systems work well. Let me know if the gopher traps are effective. My gophers rarely surface so I have trouble imagining a useful trap.

Porkpal,

The squirrel traps I'm now using are Havahart 1030. In something like five days I have had at least six visits. On the first day, one trap sprang without catching anything, and another lost all its bait without springing. So I attached the bait, peanut butter, to the roof of the cage. I've since caught two squirrels and two desert rats in three or four days. Since this kind of trap doesn't kill the beasties, I have to drive them far away. Not convenient.

Still, it seems like the pressure on the garden plants is already a little lower. The plants on the fringe that were constantly denuded by nibblers are all setting leaves. And keeping them.

I had some luck with the Gophinator when it was pocket gophers I was catching, and with The Black Hole when it was voles. I also have used flooding the holes with a garden hose as a pest control measure. It worked earlier this season.

lot better than what a lot of varmit control people here suggest for prairie dogs.. put a hose down the hole, attach the hose to a propane tank, turn on the tank & empty it into the hole, light a match & run.

kaboom

Pretty cruel, IMO. But we have to be careful with prairie dogs here in the D-metro. Supposedly, a lot of them carry "monkey pox", which is virus that is transmittable between some animals & humans. We had a few cases of it in the human population here back in '03, from prairie dogs (don't know where the prairie dogs got it from). Thereafter, people have been told NOT to physically touch prairie dogs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

I've heard of many variants on the fire in the hole theme. I've heard of people who had to go to the emergency room after pouring a few gallons of gasoline down a groundhog hole and lighting it.

I guess if the onslaught of rodents were to continue for long enough, I might have to get a long-tailed weasel which feasts on rodents. If I could find a good specimen.

Get a badger, Steve I'd get one if it weren't for my cats.

That gasoline and propane couldn't possibly be good for the plants either. It seems like an odd way to protect your garden.

Zuzu - the people who do the propane thing here aren't doing it for their gardens. These are ranchers & they're doing it to protect their cattle/horses. A horse/cow steps into a prairiedog hole is going to break it's leg almost immediately, and that means putting the animal down. I see cows dead I can't say "often" but a couple of times a year because they broke their leg & couldn't walk. The rancher doesn't go get the carcass, so it's food for the coyotes & buzzards.

You mean there are people who don't garden?

It's unthinkable.

lolll.. last night I spent a few minutes talking with one of my neighbors. I'm the only one on my block who gardens. Everyone else has a lush green landscape & that's about it. Oh, maybe a couple of tulips or A rosebush or two, but most of the time, it's grass as far as the eye can see. Told him that in order to have a thick green yard, he's going to have to water daily, which he doesn't want to do. He's thinking about doing what I've done: rip out the grass & put in mulch w/shrubs. Told him I'd be happy to help him decide what will live here & what won't. I've got plenty of experience on killing things.

Toni, I'd bet your neighbor would be interested in High Country Garden's catalogue. I've heard complaints that the plants there are too expensive, but I have had pretty good luck with them. They carry a lot of native plants from the four corners states. And I love that they list which plants require rich soil and which actually prefer poor soil, sand, clay, etc. Even if one doesn't buy there, it's a rich source of info. Good luck with your neighbor's garden.

Zuzu, I have figured out where one might buy a ferret but apart from an adopt-a-badger program in the UK, I couldn't figure out how one might possibly acquire a badger.

Steve - YIKES! that's EXPENSIVE for ferrets! Carpetsharks aren't that expensive.. usually can find them on craigslist a LOT cheaper. But I don't think that a carpetshark could take down a gopher.

I like High Country Gardens. I've never ordered from them as the plants I'd be interested in I could find locally. But they *are* a great resource for studying!

If anyone in the Denver area likes a plant that High Country Gardens carries and can't find near them, they can go to Timberline Gardens over in Arvada and buy it there in bigger pots for less money than through High Country. The owner of Timberline is in cahoots with the owner of High Country Gardens. If it can grow in our zone and High Country Gardens carries it, then Timberline has it.

(Not affiliated with Timberline, just like them a lot.)

I'll be checking them out on 5/5 when I go on the hunt for roses at Paulinos. I figure that since I'm going to be up that way anyways, might as well. Definitely interested in the hyssops http://www.highcountrygardens....

Ok, I'll bite. What on earth is a carpet shark?
Here we have plenty of pest control services who will come out and take care of any critter you don't want, long as it's not a cat or dog, or something endangered. Actually I think the only endangered thing in Kansas is a salamander that's not found down here, but you get my point.
We have a motion camera on outside at night and I can't believe how many animals come through our yard. I sure don't see them in the daytime. Of course my dogs and I are outside all day and I wouldn't leave the dogs out at night because of the coyotes and wild boars.
The critter control people aren't allowed to kill the wild boars--the landowner has to do that themself. That keeps people from bringing them up here for hunting entertainment. (if you can believe people are actually that stupid.) When we called the state biologists and told them we had wild boars come through the daylily beds, they just told us what caliber gun we would have to use. Gave my husband an excuse to buy another gun.. and I had to learn how to shoot it, and that was two years ago and my ears are still ringing. Yes I was wearing ear protection.

CarpetShark is a cutsey name for a ferret. http://www.urbandictionary.com... I don't honestly mean a real carpet shark, which is a type of real shark (bamboo, cat, etc).

Wild boars? Like, as in Hogzilla (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

Time for a pig pickin'!

Hogzilla was a hybrid resulting from a recent cross of some sort of boar (probably imported for hunting) and a domestic pig. What are commonly called "wild boars" around here are actually just feral pigs and are quite a bit smaller - a real threat nonetheless!

PPal - (your name would imply you know something about this then!) are you talking about javalinas? They're very very small. I haven't seen one in the wild since I was a child (early 80s) when, one Thanksgiving, my father & I went rabbit hunting. We got 3 jacks (had to discard each as they were completely infected with worms), and startled a nest (?) of javalinas (about 3-5 of them.. quite small, about the size of a cocker spaniel, which is pretty tiny compared to a regular piggie.. we raised 4 pigs when I was a teenager (2 neutered boars one year, a neutered boar & a sow three years later) and the javalinas were a breath bigger than the 8 week old piglets we'd brought home.)

Javalinas are actually peccaries - only distantly related to pigs. Feral hogs are domestic pigs that escaped captivity and over generations have reverted to a rather wild, hairy creature - but still a pig.
As it happens ( long story) I have both domestic pigs and a pet javalina. Let me see if I can find a picture of Pshammy. Due to neutering and better nutrition, he is much larger than his wild relatives who are, as you said, medium dog sized.