Sherry, I'm speechless about your hand. You've got to take care of yourself! I hope you can find some home treatment to ease that hand. (I'm sorry for your rot, too... This year I don't have any, thankfully, but I do have a lot of leaf spot.)
I'm really sorry about your gopher losses Sue.... they are nasty little critters. It's a small consolation, but congrats on getting one of them.
I'm afraid to use gopher traps now, with Warp out in the yard. (Prior to Warp, we hired someone to come in and set traps. One summer we had a gopher absolutely terrorizing us, totally destroying or devouring plants left and right, and the expert gopher trapper was befuddled. It took him all summer to finally catch the perp (he quickly caught several
other gophers in another part of the property); he said that it was the biggest gopher he had ever caught! (I'm guessing it may have been the smartest gopher, too. He had to try several tricks to finally nail it.))
So since we can't trap anymore, we've been using those smoke flare things instead. I don't think they've gotten any irises
this year, though they did get both of my white flowered Drakensberg daisies.
(Many years ago, they wiped out all of one drift of 'Arctic Express' (I had 2 drifts on either side of a path) before I knew what was happening! That same year, they also got both plants of a wonderful dahlia which I have not been able to get again.
)
My one consolation re the gophers is that there are a lot of plants here which they
won't eat... starting with the daylilies.
Oh, I discovered a new kind of gopher basket thing, only it's not really a basket. When I was at my favorite nursery last week, I was looking for those new-fangled pre-formed (they look like miniature wastebasket) gopher traps, which I was going to try out.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01BLYXQJK/ They were already sold out of them (in the 1 gal size, which is what I wanted), and I didn't want the old, usual kind (which are a major tripping hazard in the garden, not to mention a pita to use), so the clerk pointed me at these prefabricated rolls of mesh, sized for 1 gal plants. You just unroll the mesh so it holds the plant root ball (like putting the root ball into a sock) and then plant. Easy peasy! (It's after midnight and the package with the unused rolls is out in the shed now, but if it was not this product, it was something very similar:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XH42BMF/ ) Since I couldn't get any new Drakensberg daisies (my little surviving pieces will take a year to get big enough to plant out), I got two white flowered
Osteospermum instead (for those two spots), and put them into those root guards. (Gophers may not like
Osteospermum but even if they do, those plants are now protected. Try biting
those, gophers!)
