Depressing Greenhouse Disaster (FIXED)

hi everyone LA from wineberry Hill here some of you might have noticed that I haven't been posting anything about the actual plants growing in my geothermal greenhouse and so in this video I'm going to come clean about a pretty depressing problem that I'm having step into my office it started a couple months ago when I noticed some strange holes in the soil of my garden bed and I thought well it's probably mice and so I set up a camera to try to catch the culprit in the ACT well once I actually looked at the footage I discovered that I was wrong it wasn't mice it was mice and moles now when it comes to mice mice are are omnivores really I mean they really they'll eat anything they'll eat seeds they'll eat seedlings they'll eat larger plants uh they'll eat bugs they'll eat worms um they'll eat each other so yeah that's a problem to have that in a greenhouse where I want to start seedlings but moles you see that's where I start to get really depressed the thing that moles like to eat the most is worms and you know I really pride myself in the quality and quantity of worms in my garden soil it's something that I strive to maintain a really healthy biome of of uh bacteria and fungus and worms well the average mole can eat between 50 and 100 worms in a day and so you can see why this gets depressing because as every day Ticks by hundreds and as each month Ticks by thousands of worms are being depleted from my soil so I was feeling pretty helpless and so at this point I decided to deploy every trap that I had in my inventory so this was sticky traps uh it was snap traps it was live traps and I put them everywhere I could think of in the greenhouse and then and then added even more right nothing for about a month nothing was happening and I should add you know as an aside when I built the greenhouse I I went to Great Lengths to try to prevent this from happening the entire Underside the entire footprint of the structure is covered in/ Quin hardware cloth and so I thought I had done a pretty good job well obviously there was a wrinkle there was a hole there was a tear and they were getting in somewhere in the soil of the greenhouse and so a month went by not much is happening I'm not making any progress I had a camera going and really the camera was capturing footage of mice walking around walking on but never going into the traps and so you can see how this is depressing I can't make any progress I can't put any you know plants to actually grow in here um you know aside from the stuff that's big and established because the mice are going to decimate it and the moles are going to undermine the root system and make the plants unhealthy so I was I was feeling pretty depressed and then after about a month a really crazy thing happened uh I caught a mole in one of the mice live traps now now the reason that that's crazy is because the bait that I use in these live traps is peanut butter moles don't eat peanut butter it's just not something that they eat and yet there he was I caught him and so I was pretty happy about that and then about a week later I caught a mouse in that live trap and then as I was emptying the live trap I realized um there was actually more than one Mouse in there there was probably two or three and the mouse had eaten the others now I'm I'm humanely disposing of these uh mice so that they're not you know just letting them go and then they're coming right back into the greenhouse so now I'm I'm thinking I'm taking players off of the board uh but I'm still struggling with this problem of you know the mice by and large just very keenly walking around and avoiding the traps and so at this point I decided okay I'm going to I'm going to try to figure out I need to stop doing the same thing and so I bought mole specific scissor traps and I got a bucket flip trap for the mice and that's when things really started to kind of turn the corner oddly enough within uh a few days of me setting up the bucket trap another mole decided to go into the live mouse trap with the peanut butter bait I don't know why you know any mole experts out there let me know if you know but mice did start in Earnest going into this live bucket trap and pretty quickly it went from like one a day to maybe one a week and that's kind of getting us to the the present moment in time I've realized I just am going to have to have that bucket flip trap as kind of a permanent fixture in the greenhous and maybe once every two or 3 weeks a mice will find its way in however they do and it finds its way to a luscious peanut butter Utopia by which I can take care of them and remove them from the greenhouse and so that brings us to the present day um I'm feeling more optimistic there were some days there where I was so depressed because I felt absolutely helpless uh some of you might be wondering well why didn't you use poison there's poison for both options there's poison grubs So-Cal poison grubs that you can use for moles and there is all kinds of poison that you can use for mice the reason I will absolutely categorically refuse to use poison is multifold um I really I'm sensitive about harming the the ecosystem the delicate balances of the ecosystem it's hard enough almost having kind of an artificial ecosystem in a greenhouse and so I love having foxes and bobcats and Hawks um on the property and poisoning their food source would bring all of that to an end so poison simply wasn't an option but really my takeaway from this was those stinking bucket flip traps are amazing and work incredibly well and this crazy idea that I just needed to keep deploying more of the same it was a stupid thing to do I needed to change change it up I I don't know if it's correctly attributed to Albert Einstein but doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results is the definition of insanity and so that's something I was definitely doing hoping for better results by just doing the same thing over and over again soon as the bucket trap came out we started getting results so I am going to be very soon making a video about the process that I'm going to be going through to kind of rejuvenate the raised bed I'm going to kind of check on the worm population um I'm also going to start getting a bunch of seedlings going and uh kind of tackling things on that front and so I'm curious what has worked for you when you've had rodents in your garden was there something specifically that you found that worked I would love to know now if you made it to this point in the video and you're not one of my subscribers please consider subscribing um you you can't know how much of a difference it makes uh to someone like with a small YouTube channel like this to those of you that are subscribers I just can't thank you enough thank you so much uh for supporting the channel and then there was one other thing that I wanted to mention to you die hard um wineberry Hill followers and that is I have started a new channel specifically dedicated to the wild animal aspects of my property it's called wineberry wild and it's dedicated to kind of the various Antics and situations that come up to having uh cameras set up to to capture these wild animals on my property so if that's something that you would be interested in be sure to check out wineberry wild and if you lik this video you might like [Music] these [Music] oh

Channel: Wineberry Hill

Views: 3,412

Keywords: greenhouse, gardening, mole in the garden, killing moles in yard, mouse trap, greenhouse build, greenhouse gardening, diy greenhouse, geothermal heated greenhouse, catching mice in a bucket, Pest control, Natural pest control, kill mice, sonic rodent repellent, get rid of mice, walk in greenhouse

Id: G9dX7_EsuGY

Length: 9min 40sec (580 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 22 2024