How to Keep Gophers & Groundhogs From Eating Your Garden..

hey guys so yesterday on the video I told you I was going to be getting a load of mushroom compost delivered today here it is the first thing I've got to do though is test it for salt as I found out last year mushroom compost can be salty too salty for especially seeds but even for tiny seedlings so I got a salt test this is just from a pool supply store cup of filtered water and a little bit of compost and we're gonna see what it comes out to be we'll see if I can use it immediately or if I have to let it sit so I'm just going to wait a few minutes for it to get kind of dissolved in the water and then I'll do the test okay the yellow band at the top turned dark so it means it's done and good news not sure if you can see this but the two lines at the bottom are a little darker than above that it's basically less than a 0.5 that's pretty much nothing last year I think the worst beds uh or a six so that was huge a 0.5 is about where I got them down to after leeching all the salt out so we're good to plant I still wouldn't plant seeds probably directly into only this but mixing it in to the topsoil or the compost that's already in the beds or planting seedlings you can make a little Nest around the ceilings which is probably what I'm going to do and put just a little bit of raised bed mix in there this mushroom this mushroom compost comes not fully broken down so usually I'll use it as a mulch and let the worms pull it down through the season because I'm starting fresh with the beds up in the Cottage Garden I'm going to put a few inches on and till it in because the ground really does need to be softened up and then after that you know I'll be doing no-till like everything else and I'll just put two or three inches of compost on every season I still say mushroom compost is one of the most affordable ways to get a good quality compost on a larger scale do you guys happen to remember the video I did in it was January about tulip lasagna pots I just want to show you how they turned out look at how many tulips are crammed into this one pot and what I love about them is some of them are starting to fade just a little bit they've been blooming about a week however still down inside are tulips that haven't even bloomed still Buds and not even buds so that is an experiment that absolutely worked well it's not experiment I just had never heard of it before I always wondered how people got their tulip pots crammed full of tulips when you can only put them just a little bit apart you couldn't fit that many so if you want to be ready for next year I'll link that video down below so what I'm going to be doing today is planting a couple of trees and a couple of roses that I didn't get to plant yet they were bare root so I just healed them into the ground here there's a crab apple and a regular Apple and then two David Austin Roses that are just there temporarily keeping the roots moist I didn't plant those for a couple of reasons for one I didn't have time between all the rain uh the second reason is I didn't have gopher baskets ready I ran out of wire the right size wire and I've got to protect these from the Gophers I'm not protecting everything from Gophers but the things that are like trees roses that are going to live for years and years I want to protect those now the daffodils and the Mascari Gophers don't bother so I didn't worry about those and they've been fine tulips they do that's why they're in pots so if you have a gopher issue or any other type of ground dwelling animal that hurts your or eats your plant's Roots groundhogs I'm going to show you how to make these baskets and hope keep help keep your plants from becoming food or gophers or groundhogs all right so let me go through the materials of what you're going to need to make to do this first of all you're going to need some half inch galvanized hardware cloth two foot is a pretty good overall width that you would want and then whatever length of roll you think you might need for however many of these you have to make you also want some one inch chicken wire gloves these came with the wire so I'm not sure I might be changing these but gloves keep the wire from poking you some tin snips or heavy duty wire cutters I like the kind that are flat when your hands are up here it keeps your hands out of the way of The Wire and then a pot that is a little bit larger than the root ball that you're going to be planting putting in this gopher basket so the first thing we're going to do is take this pot and wrap the wire around it this just gives you kind of like a measuring device and just you wanted to overlap about an inch and find out then where you need to cut that and cut it so that you're going to have some wire sticking out here and that's going to help you attach it into a circle so I cut it right along the wire that I'm cutting against then we're just going to take this wire we're going to overlap it a couple of squares and push the wire through and bend it back on itself so it kind of creates a hook and we're just going to go down you don't have to do all of them that way just you know every five or six you could also just take some wire and sew these together these gloves are sticking to the wire just kind of bend the wire down and then stick it through and then bend it back on itself you can also if it hurts your fingers you can use a like needle nose pliers all right so now you've got a cylinder of wire now you're going to take the chicken wire and double it over itself and try to get the wire to not line up perfectly make smaller holes now you could use half inch holes I suppose that I feel like this double layer makes it even harder for the gopers to get through this is going to go on the bottom of this basket now you could use this on the bottom as well you could just cut this and kind of fold it all in and that would be fine for plants that aren't going to develop big Roots they will not get out of this this could take years and years to dissolve or to rust away and The Roots won't be able to get out of this basket and you're going to slow your your tree down or whatever you're growing so what this does the chicken wire most gopher tunnels are within the top foot that's their feeding tunnels so if we can get it down below that this is still going to keep them out for a few years but it's going to eventually rust and The Roots then will be able to get out of the bottom of this basket and by that time hopefully your tree will be big enough where they're not going to hurt it by chewing off some of the smaller roots that are outside of the basket you just want an overlap of about six inches four to six inches all around now we'll go out and dig our hole to be able to put this down inside so we're going to go up here and do the crab apple first the crab apple tree is going to grow here on the left side of the cottage between the cottage and the driveway now there's about a 25 to 30 foot spread by 20 feet tall on this crab apple so I'm gonna move it further away from the cottage than the driveway because I want it to be able to grow and maybe hang a little bit over the roof not too much and I'm great with it hanging over the driveway and kind of giving a sheltered canopy to drive under foreign so test the hole to make sure it's the right width the right depth you want about six inches between the ground level and the top of the wire now on this side it's going to be more because there's a slant here but so this is about the right level at this point so we're going to take the chicken wire push it down into the bottom kind of fold the sides neatly there's no seams that are going to be opened now it's easier if you can bend this in a little bit put it down and then let it expand inside that chicken wire in there fill back in with some soil here not amending the soil because when you plant fruit trees unless you have really horrible sandy soil really horrible clay soil and that's it if you want the tree to find its way you don't want it to be comfy in this nice little hole you made for it and not send its roots out further to find a larger spot to grow in loosen up the soil that we had these have only been here a couple of weeks so did this because they were they were a bare root tree so they just needed to have something to keep the moisture in the roots there's a way to do that all right so this is the graft Union you want this facing north and you want it above the soil line so we'll bury it about to right there means I need a little bit more soil in here foreign and of course you want to fill in outside the wire as well all right so this is the finished uh crab apple tree and I put a stake in here 45 degrees and tied it on and the reason I do that is because when you put a stake up the entire length of the tree that tree does not have any room to move and you want this tree to blow in the wind and flex its muscles and get stronger so just putting it down here at the at the bottom it keeps the root ball from moving but it allows the tree up top to sway in the wind and get stronger as far as these two roses I realize I'm not going to be able to plant those where they need to be one is a climbing rose and it's gonna go in this area here and kind of climb up and over the entryway and then probably a little that way as well and I still have to do this bottom here you know concrete these pylons in so they don't move and just put a decorative finish so that's a little ways away so I'm going to pot that Rose and then the other Rose is going to be over here somewhere and this area still needs to be cleared out and leveled so I'm going to pot that Rose as well however I did get these three trees planted here with gopher baskets I still have to clean up these are going to be the trees that I'm going to be teaching you how to espalier so there's an apple tree a fig tree and another apple tree now I know many of you right now are getting ready to type into the comments about how concerned you are that these are this close to the House's foundation and I know that because in my in all of the videos at my old house where I showed my apple trees growing against our garage wall I always got comments about that so I will address those comments in the espalier video that will be coming out very soon because I don't want to have to do it twice so if you're interested in this method uh and are concerned about that make sure you watch that video while we were talking about fruit trees I've got quite a few here that are still potted I've got pears cherries plums nectarines peaches and apples and I'm going to be making an orchard for the apples peaches and nectarines some of which will be a spalliered mainly the apples and that is going to be here in this area next to the vegetable garden but right now it is a bit of a construction zone that's why they're in pots however the pear trees I've got two of those and I've got two cherry trees and I believe those are gonna go in the Cottage Garden I'm gonna have as many edible things in the Cottage Garden as possible because traditionally that's what a Cottage Garden would have flowers herbs vegetables and fruit so this eucalyptus tree here is going to be taken out I'm thinking this tree right here I don't even really know what it is it's going to be taken out as well and we're gonna have some cherry and pear trees in throughout here I've got this red bud here mainly for the flowers I've got another red bud here mainly for the flowers actually it's pretty much all for the flowers I've got a lilac right here that's going to be replacing this Oleander just when I get the nerve to dig it out cut it down and dig it out and the crab apple is back there so that should give us a good amount of uh filtered shade for certain parts of the Cottage Garden every single one of the trees that I'm planting up here is going to give us spring color and a lot of them will give us some fall color as well so I'm really trying to create an all-season interest with everything around here not just the Cottage Garden I need to get my weeding tool out here and clean all of this up I do have to address something that several of you called me on in yesterday's video on weeding um many of you let me know how healthy dandelions are and that I should have kept them and ate them and all I have to say to that is if you can eat dandelions more power to you I cannot stand them I don't know how anyone eats them I gave them to the chickens I don't know how the chickens eat them but they love them so somebody is eating them but not me and that makes me think about something as well those of you who live in cold climates are dandelions killed when they go through freezing Winters because I I cannot fathom planting dandelions like planting them on purpose they're so invasive here so I don't know how you do it so I'm just going to clean up now we've got rain coming early tomorrow morning hopefully not too much but anyway if you learned something or enjoyed the video please give it a thumbs up consider subscribing if you haven't already share it with a gardening friend and I'll see you next time

Channel: Next Level Gardening

Views: 45,035

Keywords: keep gophers from eating your garden, keep gophers fomr eating your garden, how to stop gophers from eating your garden, keep gophers form eating your garden, how to prevent gophers from eating your garden, keep gophers out of garden, how to prevent gophers fomr eating your garden, how to prevent gophers form eating your garden, groundhogs, gophers, garden, organic, diy, Gopher baskets, next level gardening, how to plant a tree, how to stake a tree

Id: KatouGB2xuU

Length: 18min 11sec (1091 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 29 2023