Getting rid of voles, mice, and rodents in your vegetable garden.
Everyone eats, including the varmints.
I keep a wealth of mouse traps on hand. Once the appearance of rodents shows up I set out traps. They are easy, effective, and “clean” in the way they kill the pests but not the environment. Before you decide to use poison, think about why you have a garden, to eat clean food without poison, so why would you use poison at all? Using poisoned pellets to eliminate mice will work itself up the food chain. Birds of prey, fox, and house cats might get poisoned by eating a creature that just consumed poison.
After some experience, I found to bait the traps with whatever the varmint was feasting on: A piece of beet, potato, or carrot lodged into a traditional mouse trap works. Peanut butter works, pumpkin seeds work, as does the green goo you can buy in a tube. Use gloves and clean the used trap of lingering dead mouse remnants.
Set a lot of traps. If you found the vole hole, place three traps around the hole and put a small box on top. If you don’t cover the traps you may get an unsuspecting song bird.
Check the traps the next day. Keep repeating this until the rodents are cleared, but set every few weeks, or at first sight of damage.
Leave the carcasses on an exposed stump for the local hawks, owls, foxes, and bobcats. Attract these predators into your area and you will need to set fewer traps.
Unfortunately, the beets got ravished by voles and mice. Once the row cover was in place the varmints got the best of my beets. Every sizable beet had a bite taken from it. I should have known better cause the beets were put in after the potatoes and the rodents attacked the tubers leaving us with half the crop destroyed. I set the traps too late but was rewarded by a good hunt.
My mistake was not paying attention late in the season. Once the row cover was on the beets, the rodents had protection from neighborhood hawks and owls. I did eventually set traps, but too late to harvest beets. Almost every beet had a rodent bite and there was a nice vole hole in the middle of the patch.
The best way to trap mice and voles.
Get a cat!
The second best way to control rodents.
Set a variety of sizes and styles of snap traps. Bait the traps with whatever the varmints are eating. Here I used pieces of beet, forced into the bait holder in a way that the rodent would need to tug at it to remove it from the trap. I set three traps around the hole, facing the hole. In the above photo, the beets were under a row cover. Ordinarily, when a hole appears, I will set the traps around the hole and use a small box to cover the hole and the three traps.
Protection from deer
The bottom of the young trees should be wrapped with hardware cloth to prevent rodents and rabbits from eating the trunk.
Young apple, fruit, and nut trees need to be wrapped in fencing, burlap, or bird netting. Deer will nibble away and can kill young trees. Plastice bird netting works well, but anything sticking out will be “pruned”
At the end of the season, I leave what’s left of the broccoli and brassicas to the deer. They love leftovers.
