How to Remove Voles From Your Garden

hi welcome to Nets garden today we're gonna talk about the number one nuisance in my garden which is bowls or field mice it's the same animal you might know that you have voles in your garden because you see holes like this or you start to see that your plants are disappearing or maybe you'll just find the top half of a plant just sitting right next to a hole on the ground this will tell you that you have holes in your garden these are huge problem out here in Long Island and we've been trying to solve it for a long time the first thing that you can do is eliminate the habitat that voles living voles are prey so generally they're looking for cover in the form of mulch or leaves or tall grass so I make sure to weed this garden so that there's not a lot of places for them to hide the second thing is eliminate their food source if you broadcast seeds or have a bird feeder you might want to make sure that all the seeds are actually standing there and you're not just spreading seeds a food source for voles around your garden this will keep them alive over winter and make sure that they have a strong presence in your garden eating your plants the next thing you can do is protect your garden with a barrier like this fence that I've set up we have just a mesh plastic fence it's about three feet tall and then to protect the voles we have a quarter inch hardware cloth barrier right here and this goes about 10 inches underground and another 10 inches above ground and we can still see that along the fence line there are some holes here that suggests that voles still might be coming into the garden now online I've read that there's a lot of ways to prevent voles from overtaking your garden and most of them don't work the first one is these you'll see advertisements for sonic devices that emit some sort of sound that bulls apparently don't like we bought one of these it was highly rated stuck it in the ground it makes a chirping sound about every 10 seconds the holes don't really care you've seen bolt holes pop up right next to this thing it's useless the second so-called solution is juicy fruit gum this might be an old wives tale or something from the Farmers Almanac but they say if you put a slice of juicy fruit gum next to a whole hole like this they'll eat it and it'll gum up their insides and kill them well we laid out about a whole tray of juicy juicy fruit gum and the voles ate it but we kept seeing bolt holes and they kept eating our plants so I don't really think that won't work the next solution we've tried is a commercial mole and bull repellant and this is just a kind of a mixture that you can spread around your garden and allegedly voles don't like the way it smells or tastes and they'll stay away I just spread some of this around this entire garden and I've yet to see any results but I think it's gonna work something to note about this solution is that voles will move away from it so if you spread it on one side of your garden they might just move to the other side so they recommend that you start in the middle of your property and apply it moving outward to push voles outside of your property another thing to consider about this solution is that because it's just an oil mixed in with some earth solution eventually the properties are going to be diluted by rainfall and its effectiveness is going to wane over time I looked at the ingredients in here and saw that the main active ingredient is castor oil which from comes from the castor plant and I did a little research and found out that Bowles really don't like castor plants so without any effective solution yet I've gone ahead and purchased some pasture plants right over here they are extremely poisonous their actually called rice inist plants because they contain ricin and and unlike this solution they're not gonna wash away with a couple of rainfalls so what I'm going to do is I'm gonna place these around corners of the garden not too close to where we're planting any edible seeds and then see if that has any effectiveness in eliminating the bull holes now the way that you can tell if these vole holes are active and if you still have full activity in your garden is just to bat down the top of the hole right here like this and collapse it and if this is an active hole where a vole is actually living then tomorrow in about 12 to 24 hours I can come back and check and it will have been re-established as a tunnel and this will let me know that there are still holes in the garden even after voles have left you still might have these holes for weeks or even months so it's a good idea to dampen down the hole entrances to see if there's activity anyway this is what we're doing to solve holes in our garden let me know what you've done in your garden in the comment section thanks for tuning in to Ned's garden you can follow us online at Ned's garden on YouTube or nets garden 69 on Instagram Cheers

Channel: Ned's Garden

Views: 142,369

Keywords: gardening, pest control, voles, neds garden, castor plant, garden pest control, organic gardening

Id: U6t3lKZXb2o

Length: 5min 25sec (325 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 01 2018