The perimeter has been breeched! Keeping voles out of the garden

the garden defenses have done a good job in keeping the large animals out now we've got a problem with the small ones tackling voles in the garden this week on barely homesteading [Music] so we've recently noticed that we've been getting some vole incursion into the garden there's digging underneath the fence and underneath the uh short or the narrow raised beds that we have around the garden and leaving big piles of dirt where they've been digging now our cats have done a pretty good job in catching a lot of the small rodents the bowls and the mice and we've got two new cats this year to help out with that and they've all three of them turned out to be pretty good mousers but we're now finding incursions into the garden our defenses our fencing and our chicken netting over the top have kept out the large animals but there we knew from the very beginning that there was no way we're going to keep out the small rodents the vermin unless we dug down significantly all around the perimeter and then put in hardware cloth and that just wasn't feasible so what we're going to have to do is unfortunately we're going to have to result to uh poison and try to stop them from getting into the garden we don't mind so much if they're outside the garden area but in the garden we got to stop that all right another problem that we are having in addition to the snow that's going to be here on tuesday we also have bulls that have just infiltrated the garden and so we need to get a bait trap out so that we can get rid of the volts now this is a very simple trap basically it's going to be three sections of pvc connected by a t and then we'll have a cap on the pipe coming up that will be where the bait is stored and then either side of the t is where the bowls will be able to get in and eat the poison bait and then die hopefully so we're gonna make this up real quick [Music] all right so got the pieces all glued while this is drying i'm gonna get a piece of wire i'm gonna bend it in a very narrow j that will slide down into this tube and then we'll put the bait on that wire slide it down put a cap on here and then we can go put it out in the garden i'll hold it right up here okay hold that still bring it over here a little bit more there you go all right and that is our goal bait trap and so hopefully this will take care of the little buggers before they get in and decimate the garden or make a colony so that they are ready for next spring and decimate our crop next year we'll let you know how it works okay so we've put the bull trap or the vole bait out let's see what we've got and it looks like they've eaten all of it yep every last bit so let's go ahead and get some more bait out and make sure we get these guys all right four more pieces of bait there we go so hopefully this will get them so i just realized that some of you may not be familiar with voles so voles not moles but voles v-o-l-e-s are a small burrowing rodent at least up up here in the mountains they're burrowing in other places they they don't burrow but they like to go after the roots and the grubs that live around roots we've had problems with voles before particularly with our apple trees every year we've been up here we've tried to plant apple trees and every winter the voles go and eat all of the tender roots of the apple trees so that the next spring it basically is just a stick in the ground and we haven't found a solution for that yet i have one more thing that i want to try probably next spring but voles are a real problem up here one because they are burrowing and so the cats can't always get to them and two because they like to eat the roots they will kill the plants before you even realize that there's a problem and so the telltale sign of voles at least during the non-winter months is dirt mounds and you find the dirt mounds and you know that you've got full activity in that area in the winter months they will actually burrow under the snow and so you will sometimes see burrows through the snow where the voles have been traveling around and again because they're a trap they're under the snow they're protected and the the predators uh won't get to them then either and so they're kind of a sneaky little uh rodent that we have had problems with before and we definitely want to make sure we keep them out of our garden okay so the trap is working where we put it i haven't had any new vole activity in that area for a couple weeks but we are now starting to have activity on the other side of the garden over by the chicken coop there's turkey lurkey and so we've got to move the trap over here and stop the bowl incursion on this side now we've had to be really careful with uh the use of that poison to stop the voles because we don't want poison voles getting out where our cats or the predators in the area can get to them and kill those animals while we don't want the predators get into our chickens or getting our cats we definitely don't want them dying either they do a lot of good in the area and keeping the smaller rodents and the rabbits and things down and so we definitely want to encourage them being in the area but we've got to keep the bulls out of the garden and so we've had to be very judicious and careful in our use of this poison for the voles because we want them to eat the poison stay in the ground and die there so that they can't get accessed by the cats or the predators so far it's been working okay just have to keep up uh being careful and cautious and hopefully we'll be able to keep the voles out of the garden area with winter coming won't be so much of a big deal but we don't want a big colony being already having a foothold in the garden next spring so gotta try to keep them out as much as possible we'll let you know how it goes as we start up next spring and with that this is lumberjack saying use it up wear it out make it do do without please like and subscribe and we will see you on barely homesteading next time [Music] bye [Music] you

Channel: Bearly Homesteading

Views: 3,807

Keywords: vole, garden, bait trap

Id: QOfEp0TV1IM

Length: 9min 45sec (585 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 10 2020