Above: A Vole or Gopher tunnel located under the landscaping bricks in Overleaf garden. This is how they traveled unnoticed between raised beds.
Back in October I prepped my raised garden beds for a winter garden intending to plant a second crop from some seeds left over from Spring. The crops I wanted included Carrots, Radishes, and some Pole Beans that I fully expected to sprout but freeze later, but decided to chance it anyway. I planted seeds in one afternoon and waited. What followed can only be described as a mysterious gardening disaster. I’m the first to admit human error is an issue, but I’ve rarely achieved such an outstanding level of failure. This time, I’d say fully 90% of what I planted never emerged, and of the remaining 10% that did, most were eaten by something or simply shriveled and died. In the ensuing two months, I’ve been trying to figure out what went wrong. Determined to solve this puzzle, I scratched around in the dirt to investigate, and couldn’t find any sign of the seeds in the ground. Not only had they not sprouted, they had totally vanished. It’s been a true mystery.
I had resigned myself to not knowing, when about two weeks ago my neighbor mentioned his cat caught two pocket gophers burrowing in his back yard. While I hadn’t seen any signs of gophers, moles, or voles (the three common burrowing pests) in my garden, I checked all around the edges of the raised beds to be safe. Sure enough, hidden in a patch of Mondo Grass (an invasive known as monkey grass in our area) I discovered a series of burrows leading from the neighbor’s fence to the edge of one of my raised beds, one adjacent to both the beds where my crop failures occurred. Things began to make sense, as I searched for connecting burrows, and discovered under the landscaping brick border that connects the two beds a very clean, neat tunnel, a rodent highway from one raised bed to another, and to the freshly planted seed and vegetable buffet I had set out. I searched closer and found several tunnels, one along the edge of the patio, another disappearing under a concrete sidewalk. A few days later I noticed an unmistakable raised area of dirt meandering from one bed to a round stepping stone, and then on the another bed beyond. I lifted the stepping stone to reveal another tunnel. They’ve been hard at work.
Above: A Vole tunnel under a stepping stone in Overleaf Garden. A Vole highway to my garden plantings.
I’ve done some research and think what I have is most likely a Vole, which is a small mouse like rodent that eats vegetables, seeds, roots, and young plants. I had considered a possible Mole, but they eat worms and grubs, and given the neighbor’s specimens a Vole seems more likely. Similar but smaller than a Gopher, it’s more suited to the small one inch or so diameter tunnels I am seeing. I’ll be researching gopher and vole “solutions” over the next several weeks, which will probably be the subject of an upcoming post.
Mystery solved.