I am going to buy another apple tree and put it in the orchard. I have bought four apple trees over the years and all of them were decimated by the Gophers. Gophers seem to adore apple trees. At least the apple trees on my property and yet I am going to buy an apple tree because I have not had a gopher in the orchard in over a year and a half. <\/p>\n
A very good friend of mine told me about blending up kitchen scraps and pouring it down their holes. The icky food waste makes it so that they cannot simply wait a day and then use the hole again. In addition to the food scraps, I have been mixing in pond muck. And this is all written up in another post that I will try to find and put a link to here<\/a>. But its great because you’re actually putting nutrients in the ground instead of poisons! <\/p>\n It works exceedingly well, and it doesn’t kill them. Killing them simply makes your gopher problem continue because all the old existing holes are still there. I dug down and looked at how some of their tunnels were constructed and in many of them they have a little air chamber incorporated into them so that they cannot be flooded out with a garden hose either. Gophers are amazing creatures. They are incredibly well adapted, and have been doing their thing for a long long time. In fact their bones were structurally almost identical 25 … million years ago. You think there might have been a flood or two in those 25 million years that they would have figured out how to prevent their tunnels and nest areas from flooding? <\/p>\n I have always said that I was willing to share the property with the native critters and so I don’t want to poison the Gophers or poison their predators. <\/p>\n So there is about a half acre of scrub that is next to my orchard that I am perfectly willing to let the Gophers have. It had a lot of mustard growing in it that the fire department wanted me to mow in the summer … when its hot. I haven’t had to mow that area in two years now and there is very little mustard because the Gophers eat it. They’re my friends. They keep me from having to work in the hot Sun, or pay someone else to do it. The area buffers my property from my neighbors and the road and I don’t have to mow it. My Gophers are paying me. Your Gophers are costing you everytime you try to kill them. Try living _with_ the world instead of against it and you might find that you like it. <\/p>\n So my friend just sent me a note that they had photographed and rescued a gopher off their driveway who couldn’t climb up over the edging. I am so thrilled and amused. There is just no need to kill them, and by the way how’s all that poison that you’re putting around for your dog to eat working out for you? :-) http:\/\/www.PuraVidaAquatic.com<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am going to buy another apple tree and put it in the orchard. I have bought four apple trees over the years and all of them were decimated by the Gophers. Gophers seem to adore apple trees. At least … Continue reading