A Moving Experience…
Moles eat meat. Voles eat mostly vegetables. Moles like grubs and worms, whereas voles lean toward the leaner cuisine of beets and baby lettuce and your apple tree roots. The market is filled with mole moving chemicals, traps and noisy excitement for those whose lawns erupt with little volcanoes of dirt. One friend nailed a mole by sticking an M-80 down the hole and when the earth moved, touching some wires together. He said the created crater was impressive and the clear departure of the mole worth the load of topsoil needed for repairs.
Voles, on the other hand, have had nothing really organic to move them along to a new home. Until now. After some careful research and cautious testing, it appears there is a low cost way to get those little relatives of the mouse crowd to pack up and move on. Voles don’t leave mounds of soil. They love the underground tunnels left by the moles and are good at making their own, but come and go through round openings in the dirt. Those holes look like somewhere a snake might live. When you find a hole in the garden like that, take a couple cloves of garlic and drop them in the hole. Seal it all off with a bit of dirt and head to the patio for a cool beverage. Nature will take it’s course. Seems they don’t like garlic and will pack up their bags and move on like an annoying relative when you lock the fridge.
We’ve had an extended family of these rascals take up residence this winter, but now with regular application of garlic cloves down their holes, we are almost free from their pesky presence. And once it’s all over and the garlic green and tall, we’ll pull it up and make a dandy pesto that will wrap your ears around your eyes if you eat it straight.
