Basket Bondage?

It’s spring in full-tilt boogie. Where there are gophers, the trend has been to plant in wire baskets. In the past ½-inch aviary wire was used. While fairly easy to work with, it doesn’t last a long hardware cloth with regards to rust. There are some pre-made commercial wire baskets. They aren’t very deep, but the wire is studier than aviary wire.

The fear is what happens to the roots that grow thru the wire. As illustrated in my blog of 5/10/10, many roots are eaten at the wire’s edges. This makes the plant more like a container plant with the roots feeding only within the wire basket. Those that do manage to escape the cruddy teeth of the western pocket gopher have to deal with growing in and thru the wire.

The question is as the roots that grow thru the basket, as shown on the left, get harmed and is growth reduced? Wire can be included within the tissues of growing plants without apparent harm. The other photograph shows how an oak tree is slowly swallowing a 4” X 4” sign post.

In my experience a plum tree planted in a very shallow wire basket was greatly stunted. It failed to produce the thicket of long spindly shoots each summer. With all the other trees planted within 4’ deep & 3’ wide baskets, seems the trees a perfectly happy. They are the Asian pear, plum, plumcot, apple, and persimmon trees.

So it seems wire is simple swallowed up by the basket and the transport of water & nutrients up-and-down the tree remains relatively unharmed.



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Gopher It - Baskets & All

Spring time and baskets are rollin’…into the ground. Gophers in the west (certainly around my home) have sprung from the womb and are seeking new territory. This means there’s a mass migration as each gopher tries to stake out it’s new home. Thus many gophers means plenty of damage to roots. In my neck of the woods, gardeners are “planting” wire baskets with the transplants inside. It seems to work, but not all the time. I lost an apple tree to a gopher who simply climbed over the wire and into a protected paradise of yummy rootlets. I spent hours in the USDA Ag. Library (the largest collection of ag. and hort. books in the country) looking for “the answer”. I finally found a report where the researchers wanted to capture live gophers. They built a “V”-shaped live trap with 10-inch-tall wire sides. The gophers simply crawled over the wire. Alas, my futile attempt at a four-inch exposure above the mulch didn’t save the apple tree. However, I learned a lot about roots after I dug up the roots of the apple tree. Nearly 90% were inside the two-foot wide by 24-inch deep wire basket. Most roots where eaten off just as they tried to leave the basket—as seen in the photo on the left. Here is one of the lone roots that escaped the greedy gopher mouths.

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Gophers Rule (?)

The attempts to annihilate gophers in agricultural fields and gardens reveal how resilient life can be. Gophers are industrious and fertile. These pesky subterranean rodents love to eat the roots of wild and domesticated plants alike. They must tunnel no matter what they eat in order to survive. A typical gopher's teeth grow 15 inches per year. If the they didn't burrow around, a gopher's teeth would grow into a long curve which would impale the base of their own skull.

They are as reticent at being killed as they are reluctant to tunnel. A farmer might put poison bait in the soil, in fake gopher tunnels made by a tractor-draw implement, over a 20-acre area. Yet this will only protect the center of the field for approximately two years. By then, the offspring of the gophers around the edge will have migrated into the "free" area. Gardeners face a more difficult problem. Gophers are territorial. They make plenty of babies (up to seven in each “brood”) who must stake out their own turf. Even extensive trapping, the Macabee trap is my favorite, is often compromised.

Only religious, consistent trapping (especially in the Spring when the young are trying to establish their new territory), is a possible solution. Trapping in your neighbors’ yards can help the invasion from the edges. Kill more gophers!

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Gettin' Gophers

Even though it's summer, the little ground rats are taking down some of my plants. So, a different look than previous posts on killin' gophers.

I’ve had good results with the “California box trap”. I think the box trap is easier to use if you’ve never set gopher traps before. The box trap in the photo here shows the installation, but the trigger has been activated – see the wire in the up position. [The gopher from the same trap pictured above would fill the entire box!]

To set the box traps, locate the main tunnel with a probe. I use a 24” piece of rebar. The permanent or main burrow [as opposed to the feeding runs] can be found by probing about eight to 12 inches from the plug side of the visible mound and is usually located six to 12 inches deep. When the probe penetrates the gopher’s burrow, there will be a sudden, noticeable drop of about two inches. You may have to probe repeatedly to locate the gopher’s main burrow, but your skill will improve with experience.

Use a shovel or garden trowel to open the tunnel wide enough to set traps in pairs facing opposite directions. By placing traps with their openings facing in opposite directions, a gopher coming from either end of the burrow can be intercepted.

Box traps are especially useful when the diameter of the gopher’s main burrow is small (less than three inches.)

Some claim it is a good idea to use lettuce, carrots, apples, alfalfa greens, or a drop of anise oil as bait. I rub all surfaces I’ve touched with grass or weeds and be sure to rub the trap trigger. [Or, use hospital disposable gloves.] Then I leave a piece of grass or whatever then it has been eating behind the trap’s wire.

After setting the traps, exclude light from the burrow by covering the opening with dirt clods, sod, cardboard, or some other material. Fine soil can be sifted around the edges to ensure a light-tight seal. If too much light enters, the gopher may plug the burrow with soil, filling the traps and making them ineffective. I place a large piece of plywood or cardboard over the entire “excavation” to make sure no light gets through.

The theory is that the gopher feels the flow of air and wants to plug the breach of the tunnel system. The gopher runs through the tunnel and is in the box before it knows it because the flashing on top of the box excludes light but allows air to escape.

Check traps often and reset them when necessary. If a gopher is not caught within 24 hours, reset the traps in a different location.

This is adapted, in part, from: Publication 7433, University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. Revised January 2002.

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Gopher it!

It's spring, the young gophers are out, searching and fighting over new territory. The battle begins.

The earliest “modern” settlers of our coast north of the San Francisco bay were the Russians in March of 1812. They were gone by 1842. One anecdotal saying goes “we could have made a living if it weren’t for the ground rats”.

Ah yes, the hated gopher. These herbivores tunnel at both shallow and deep depths to eat on the roots of plants. An average of 22 gophers per acre translates into four pounds of fresh vegetation eaten every day—a rather healthy diet. It is thought that there are 1,000,000,000 rodents in California of which the most abundant is the pocket gopher. Large fur-lined external cheek pouches are used for temporally storing food. Thus the name pocket gopher, referring to these pouches, or pockets. Sometimes they collect pieces of roots, such a carrots, and stash them in a food reserve burrow for perhaps a truly “rainy day”. Many gardeners have watched a wiggling garlic top or freshly-planted lettuce and all of the sudden it is pulled beneath the soil. Fodder for the ravenous western pocket gopher.
(Those of you who live in the northeastern part of the country are blessed—no gophers. Skip the rest with delight.)

Gophers are very nocturnal creatures walking or skirmishing across the surface looking for new places to burrow. This is especially frantic in the spring, usually March and April, as young gophers go for their own territory. Once a gopher has a territory it maintains if for life. But for unexplained reasons, male gophers are polygamous which means their territories overlap or they wander at night to court their next “babe”.

The common gopher snake is thought of by gardeners as a hopeful controller of this pest. Alas, studies have shown that only 6.4% of the snake’s diet comes from gophers—better than nothing I guess. (Gopher snakes are territorial. So don’t try to move one form someplace to your garden. They’ll just wander off in pursuit of their previous home.) Rattlesnakes get only 2.5% of their diet from eating pocket gophers as the tunnel system makes it unlikely for them to coil and strike. The most significant predator, at 71.4% of it’s diet, is the barn owl which eats at night as the rodents scurry along the surface of the soil. The average barn owl will eat 155 gophers per year. Alas, if a great-horned owl lives within one square mile, the barn owls are scared away or eaten—something overlooked by the local vineyards that are trying to appear to be environmentally responsive by putting up barn owl nesting boxes near where great-horned owls reside.

In spite of the barn owls, most gardeners have resorted to wooden raised beds with wire bottoms—galvanized one-half inch aviary wire or hardware cloth. This doesn’t always stop them. A friend has vegetable boxes 12 inches high with wire bottoms. There was a gopher mound or “throw”, such as they are inclined to make when surfacing, up against the wood. He watched as the gopher merely climbed on top of the throw and hopped over the top of the board.

Wire baskets are becoming required planting additions for perennials, shrubs and trees. I once had a wire basket protecting an apple tree. The wire was four inches above the mulch. That didn’t stop a gopher from climbing over the wire to be encaged with all those succulent roots. The tree leaned over and simply died. However, wire baskets often work.

Lining the garden with a fence is trickier and riskier. Studies show that the fence would have to be at least two feet deep and up to seven feet deep in deep soils. One research study found gophers getting over a 10-inch high barrier! One recommendation would be that the fence would have to extend to 12 inches above the soil. Nothing is simple or safe!

I recently helped maintain an estate garden riddled with gophers. Even though all the dahlias were wrapped in 1/2” aviary wire, up to one quarter were destroyed by these troublesome varmits. I taught another guy on the crew how to use a Macabee trap—with its piercing tongs. After a month or so he had killed 100 gophers. So I presented him with a Macabee trap sprayed gold as a trophy. Sad truth was the owner stopped the trapping program. Gopher mounds showed up in her lawn and more dahlias bit the dust.

There is no silver bullet.

I must admit I find gophers fascinating, when I’m not cursing them, knowing that they must tunnel to keep their teeth in order. If unable to tunnel, their teeth would grow up to 14 inches a year in a curl that would eventually pierce their skull. Not a pretty sight. Although many gardeners would be delighted.

I’m always curious about their tunnel systems. The feeding tunnels, which terminate in a mound, are usually four too eight inches beneath the surface. The maintain “highways” used for routine travel are 12 or more inches deep. And gopher tunnels have been found at a depth of six feet. So I tried pouring plaster of Paris down a tunnel. I did get some of the plaster down to the second run. This mold of a gopher run hung from my ceiling for months.

After St. Helens, in Washington, erupted in 1980 it was the activity of gophers, their defecation, that brought mutually-symbiotic mycorrhizae to inoculate other plants for a better and healthier life and the restoration of the disturbed soil. (Mycorrhizae are beneficial fungi that extend to the root system of many plants to make it easier to gather nutrients such as phosphorous. Trees are especially dependent on phosphorous for good growth. Without the mutual symbiosis of the mychorrhizal association most trees would not prosper. The tree gives the mycorrhizae carbohydrates in exchange—this is not a parasitic association but is a two-way street for the benefit of both.)

Gophers turn over the soil more effectively than earthworms. And the mounds are good for the soil. One report (Effects of Pocket Gopher Mounds on Plant Production in Shortgrass Prairie Ecosystems, W. E. Grant, N. R. French and L. J. Folse, Jr.) states “…total above-ground plant production would be increased by roughly 5.5% by the presence of the mounds.” So they aren’t completely malicious critters with no worth what-so-ever.

I still hunt these “ground rats”.


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