By George! - A Blog!

This story relates more specifically to the Sabino Vista Garden, but I feel it won’t be long before our other gardens are invaded by gophers and ground squirrels.  Our gardens are surrounded by empty desert land which is a natural home to these animals.  Furthermore, our gardens provide food and moisture for them.

Remember that ground squirrels run over the surface of the earth although they make a home deep down.  Gophers, on the other hand, live underground though they do at times travel over the surface.  We don’t have moles in Arizona.

Any kind of control calls for a continuous and methodical effort. This control can be compared to brushing your teeth or cleaning house. A partial one shot deal will not work.

My choice of control starts with trapping. There are gopher traps that you put in the underground runs that the gophers make. Snap rat traps will catch squirrels and you will have to be mindful about the possibility of catching birds, cats and other pets.  Gophers can be trapped by digging into a recent run. You can find one by looking at the freshness of mounds that they push up.  Leave the mounds alone but between two fresh ones carefully excavate into the run.  Put down two traps–one to catch a gopher going one way and the other to catch a gopher coming the other way.  These traps are set off by a gopher pushing against a plate. This releases a spring that pinches the gopher and kills it.  You need to inspect your traps for success every day or so. No bait is required.

Squirrels can be caught with the large rat trap that snaps on to the animal when it disturbs the trigger mechanism.  This is done by the animal eating the bait.  Good baits include pieces of apple or peanut butter.

Any trapping program needs to be extensive (say using ten traps at any one time) and frequent attention to remove dead animals and to set the traps in other places. Setting one or two traps is not going to be effective.

Here are some measures that gardeners have taken but have not proved effective:  1.  Using dry ice in the burrows. The idea is to asphyxiate the animals in the ground.  Dry ice is put into the burrows and the holes are sealed with dirt to prevent the carbon dioxide from evaporating.  2.  Putting bubble gum down the holes. The soft kind is what is used and the shiny Chiclets are ineffective. 3.  Putting water down the holes of gophers in an attempt to drown them has had mixed success and we want to avoid the use of poison chemicals.  Efforts of using poison gas by the City Parks at Hummel Park for one time only was not effective.

Here are three or four suggested measures to try: 1. Build boxes of hardware cloth, bury them in the ground, fill them with dirt.  You have to be careful to bend over the sides towards the middle to make a wire cube because squirrels will climb up the sides and go down inside the cube and eat your plant.  Gophers might well do the same.  If you don’t like to make a number of cubes, then you can dig out your plot to two feet, lay hardware cloth on the floor and the sides and return the dirt to your plot.  You will need to do a surface covering to make your garden pest proof.

It has been suggested and without conviction that if we plant castor bean seed on the perimeters of our garden we will make a barrier that gophers will not pass.  Another plant to consider is Gopher Spurge (Euphorbia lathyrus). These will need to be irrigated to induce germination but they are dryland plants.