How to Deal with Moles, Voles, and Chipmunks in the Garden – Part Three: Garden-wide Eviction

Some notes on this technique.  There are a few notable points concerning the use of this technique in my garden.

• Product directions.  What I’ve outlined above is roughly the same application paradigm many repellent manufacturers suggest for use with their respective products.  In terms of settling on a repellent that’s right for you, please feel free to view this list of recommended repellent products.  Whichever product(s) you choose, please read and follow all manufacturer directions.
• Painstaking application by hand.  As I mentioned earlier, repellent application of this sort would be a snap if I were trying to drive pests out of a wide open lawn.  I could apply the product quickly and easily using a common drop or broadcast fertilizer spreader.  This is not the case with my heavily-planted garden.  Not only do I need to apply the product by hand, I’ve got to make sure it’s applied amply and evenly on the ground in which my plants are growing.  This often involves moving foliage aside and kneeling down among the various plants to ensure proper repellent application.
• Re-application.  Because of my garden’s location right in the heart of Vermin Central, the bad guys are always trying to get in.  The issue of ensuring that enough repellent makes its way down into the soil through my garden’s layer of wood mulch is also a concern.  Frequent re-application is often necessary.
• The easy part.  The fact that my garden, overall, is shaped like a big rectangle makes for easy “sectioning off” of my three sections of repellent application.  The basic rectangular shape allowed me to measure off three equally-sized sections of my garden for successive repellent application (and re-application).
• Voles.  At present, voles are basically my only garden pest problem.  My chipmunk stays, for the most part, on the north side of our property outside the garden’s fence.  He was the first and easiest of my pests to evict from the confines of my garden proper.  Moles are also a problem of the recent past.  With the exception of a minor exploratory feeding tunnel or two at my garden’s perimeter every once in awhile, there is no evidence that my moles have returned to the garden itself.  Voles, however, remain a persistent problem.  The fact that I had unwittingly been harboring an infestation is the primary cause of this persisting issue – I had a huge number of them to begin with when I first started working to drive them away.  Although I’ve substantially reduced their poulation in my garden by using the technique I’m describing here (and by my repair/repel techniques described in Part Two of this article), I still have one or two pockets of voles located toward the north end of my garden.  The fact that their tunnels, at one time, could be found in almost every single planting feature, but now exist only in a couple of spots toward the north end of the garden tells me that my repellent application techniques are working.

The Wild Card:  Help from Nature

Predators in my garden.  In the late summer or early fall of last year, I discovered that some animal had been excavating in my garden.  There were large holes dug out of a number of my planting features and some of my plants were even uprooted.  I repaired the damage to the best of my ability, but awoke to more of the same damage the next morning.  Since I had seen raccoons and possum on our property many times, and since the damage occurred overnight (raccoons and possum are nocturnal, primarily) I assumed it was one or the other which was to blame for the damage.  At the time, I didn’t give too much thought to the potential inspiration for such excavating.  I just knew it was a pain to fix and that I wanted it to stop.  A heavy dose of coyote/fox urine granules did the trick.  I sprinkled it liberally throughout the garden and along the outside perimeter of the garden’s fence line.  I repeated the application per the manufacturer’s directions and I never had a repeat of the activity.  Foxes and coyotes are apex predators in our area, and lesser predators like raccoons, possums, mink, feral cats, etc. are on the menu.  Each of those animals avoid any area where there is a scent of fox or coyote.

Back then, If I’d understood the meaning of all of that digging, I might have reconsidered my decision to repel predators from my garden.

I now, however, get the picture.  Whatever was digging in my garden at night wasn’t just passing the time.  It was digging in pursuit of burrowing prey – namely moles, voles, and chipmunks.  I’m now pretty sure that the day I sprinkled fox/coyote urine around and throughout my garden, I enabled the beginning of my modest mole and chipmunk presence, and my full-blown vole infestation.

Fast-forward to late June/early July of this past summer.  The signs of a predator in my garden were once again evident – holes in the planting beds, uprooted plants, even the killing of one of our frogs from our frog ponds.  Again, my assumption was raccoon or possum.  And again, I treated the garden and its perimeter with apex predator pee.  And I re-treated and re-treated, keeping my garden safe from whomever was the digger.  And I simultaneously (and unwittingly) enabled a population explosion of voles in my garden.

It wasn’t until just a few weeks ago that the clouds parted, the dawn broke, and I pulled my head out of my ass.  Over the late summer and early autumn, I had grown lax in my fox/coyote pee application regimen.  As a result, the nocturnal digging returned.  But this time, it seemed more direct, more targeted.  I could see where vole nests had been laid open and their tiny tunnels enlarged.  Evidence of a vole massacre was apparent.  At that moment, I made the decision to allow this predator free run of my garden.  My frog population was intact, the digging mess was easily fixed, and best of all, there were no new vole tunnels or holes to be found anywhere.  At that point, I remembered a terrific Twitter exchange I had with another gardener dealing with her own vole woes.  She mentioned, only half-jokingly, that she was considering attracting cats to her garden with catnip so that they could take on the task of removing her voles.  I joked about it with her.  Now, it wasn’t a joke.  It was a solution.  My unknown predators would play a natural role in the pest elimination process.

Now, most of you who read my material on this site or on other social media platforms know that I am incapable of harming anything that breathes.  But if a natural vole predator were to come along…   Okay, I know it seems a little mercenary, but by allowing this predator (by now, I think I know who he or she is) to do what comes naturally, I’m eliminating (or at least drastically reducing) an unnaturally large vole population in, and restoring nature’s balance to, my ornamental perennial garden.  Since this predator has returned (or shown up – if it’s a different predator than the one doing the digging last year or earlier this summer), none of my frogs have been harmed and the remaining pockets of vole activity seem to be disappearing.  When I put the situation into perspective, the pros easily outweigh the cons.  Periodic tidying of my planting beds or wholesale destruction of my plants by a voracious population of voles.  Kind of a no-brainer.  

And I’ve had time to do some research.  I now believe my nocturnal vole hunter is a mink.  This guy (or gal) is solitary, nocturnal, and incredibly precise in his (her) hunting methodology.  There is evidence that he/she is, at times, entering the vole tunnels themselves (there are instances where there is some minor excavation but significant tunnel enlarging.  A mink will often slip into the tunnels of its quarry when hunting.  I’m really starting to think mink.

In any case, whether mink, raccoon, or possum, this predator is definitely playing a key role in the removal of tunneling pests from my garden.  And he or she is truly doing it with a comparatively minimal amount of collateral damage.