Re: gophers
- Subject: Re: gophers
- From: p*@att.net
- Date: Sun, 01 Sep 2002 22:49:07 +0000
I am glad to hear confirmation of what I thought was so,
that wire barriers are the best way to avoid losing a
garden to gophers. Just one comment, and that is that I
think that regular chicken wire has openings too large
to stop the smallest gophers, so you need to use what
they call "aviary wire." It looks the same, but the
openings are a bit smaller. Hardware cloth, which has
even smaller openings, should be fine too, but probably
more expensive. And for individual plants, you can buy
large or smaller individual "baskets" that come
collapsed flat, ready to open up and use to line a hole.
There is a photo of the aviary wire lining of a bed I
built for my dad in the Sunset Western Garden Problem
Solver, on page 44.(I think they cropped the photo a bit
too tight for it to be clear that the lining is in a
raised bed built with a wooden frame around it. The
large metal brackets are to hold the frame together.)
What we get in our small San Francisco backyard from
time to time are, I think, moles. They make volcano-
shaped mounds and do not seem to eat plants, but I am
puzzled because they don't seem to make ridges between
the mounds, which I thought moles always did. Someone
once told me that there are moles that do not leave
raised ridges between mounds, but couldn't tell me a
name. Anyone know about these guys?
Pam Peirce,
San Francisco, CA
