How To Effectively Control Voles In The Garden. Why Sounds & Sprays Do Not Work On Voles.

I have a v problem hello fun people how are you guys doing today if you're new around here my name is Ashley and we are in the kitchen because I'm canning and doing all sorts of stuff and one thing I am doing today is beets now I have a v problem out at the farm I want to show you how to identify V damage and specifically how to take care of vs or at least at a minimum control them because eliminating them entirely especially in rural settings is going to be very difficult so let's get into it so I have never had wol issues in my garden my parents have and this is kind of my first time at having a v issue so I grew some enormous beads this year literally the size of my head and it's normal for beads to have kind of this rough upper lip that's normal because there's several stems and leaves coming out the top so it can give you a rough appearance especially as these leaves die out what's not normal however in is complete gaps and chew marks which is what quite a number of my Beats have and you can see some are scarred over and then others are relatively fresh and I would have liked to have left my beads in it's looking like it's going to possibly be a later knock on wood winter and so I wanted to leave them in place but unfortunately this sort of damage to your beet will completely decimate any storage time that the Beet did have so these guys will not be stored I'm going to have to basically cut this in half and I'm only going to be able to use the portions of it that are not KN on so just this back half and that's the case for a large number of these big bad boys so I'm going to be making borish I have my beef stock Brewing from scratch and going to do beet relish and then I'm just going to can pressure can just beats in general so I got to get entire rubber made of these guys process we don't eat a ton of beets we eat some beets so I didn't do a whole swack low to have one single rubber made I'm sure it's like 100 lbs worth of beets but I mean some people like beets more than others anyways so when it comes to V damage they will literally gnaw away at your roots or stems of your plant near the ground so in this case unfortunately that is the edible part in other cases you may notice flopped over plants like if your Corn's flopping over where your tomatoes are flopping over or dead patches of grass is another sign of vs you'll see little tiny holes kind of poking up all over and if you have cats or dogs you're going to know notice them really obsessing on the ground so they're going to be digging sniffing and acting kind of goofy vs like to hide under debris so if you mulch your area they will find that very ideal habitat for them to live in and so they will invade that in this case they were not malt it was just just very heavy cover very tight row spacing if you watched my garden tour on the farm you know that I packed things in really nice and tight and I did kind of like a succession cropping meaning for the crops that are going to be ready early in the year I planted them next to later crops so then I was pulling out the early crops letting the later crops then fill in the space so it was very compact almost like a permaculture type setup where there's just plants on top of plants completely unnecessary given the fact that I have so much space to work with but anyways I digress and so because of that they found ideal little habitats to hang out in so one way to make vs move on is to actually space the crops out enough that there is a visual line of sight for predators to come in whether that be cats or prey Birds what or predator birds whatever the case is and destroy those V populations slowly or at least in a minimum scare them off so things like the sound makers don't work a lot of people have said they do they really don't they didn't work for my parents anyways as well and then the other thing that does work or can work for smaller infestations would be castor bean um so that's either castor bean oil on some sort of a carrier if you use that though every time it rains you're going to have to reapply so keep that in mind that also includes when you water it's just going to slowly disappear there's people that that have tried planting actual casor plants now I don't know if I'm going I'm not going to recommend this because cter bean plants are poisonous to humans and I'm not sure when they're near your produce what could possibly happen if there's going to be leeching or anything like that so that one I'd be a little bit more wary of but the way to control these guys is mechanical meaning we're setting up traps or we're setting up what um a lot of universities recommend is a great and so you actually would dig the grate into the ground it's a very fine mesh you have to go down at least 10 in and then surround the entire Garden you would have some above ground as well this may work for like an orchard scenario or a smaller sized Garden but for my garden it's just completely out of the question so what I'm going to be doing is removing everything from that Garden I will not be cover cropping I will not be leaving any debris in place on that Garden and the soil will be completely wiped clean or tilled under all that plant debris is just going to get tilled under and it's really going to scare those guys off because it's just going to be an open field and the hope is that they will move on next here I'm going to make sure that the area surrounding the garden is tilled and continually mowed again just leaving it very open and scary looking to those vs and then of course you can set up traps now the traps you set up need to be very specific you don't want them just laying out if you have dogs or cats or anything like that and you want to do the PVC pipe trap my grandma and my mom have both used this it works very very well basically put poison on a rod inside of a te they crawl through the little tunnel PVC pipe and then they go to the center to nibble away at whatever's in there and then they will cease to exist so that is a great way to actually control control those guys and then lastly this is again just another way to deter them on top of like the tillage and the removal of all crops and all plant debris is to incorporate blood meal so my dogs I did this this year my dogs absolutely went crazy for it they were rolling in it and they were trying to dig up the garden it was very irritating so I'm not going to use that in the city anymore because they were just like yeah this is awesome so I think the best way for the average person um that doesn't have cats or doesn't have a dog um issue in their backyard would be to actually incorporate blood meal they don't like raded animal smell um and then you could also do coyote Ur is another one uh this works for rabbit squirrels and Bulls as well it may or may not attract mice and rants though just a heads up on that the mice are very bad this year in Batoon I don't know if it's because I've reconvened the whole composting thing I didn't put any animal products I mean eggs nothing that they want to eat in my compost that's not sealed the only thing I did was the fish and the bone or the bone and the blood meal I'm not sure if that was what got them all wound up and like in my area but I've had one in the house that my cat de to bring it to bed for me and then I had one in my Jeep so I'm kind of disgusted right now so that's two mice two mice and I don't know where they've come from and I've went like 5 years now with no mice so anyways I want to thank you guys for watching like I said the best way to control those bows is not necessarily these sensors or any of these fancy little things you want to clear it Off remove all root crops leave it very exposed do not mulch it and then ideally you would set up a poison trap or you would set up a trap that is going to snap on them ideally and it needs to be inside of a tube it has to be a tube type tunnel for them to feel comfortable enough to actually go inside of it anyways I want to thank you guys so much for watching if you enjoyed the video be sure to give it a thumbs up hit that subscribe button and let me know in the comments down below if the vs took out your garden because this was an actual subscriber requested video as well because some of you have had this issue which is unfortunate to say the least anyways I'll talk to you guys next time bye

Channel: Gardening In Canada

Views: 14,735

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Id: 4mhMbv6FGdk

Length: 9min 1sec (541 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 03 2022