The Mole Hunt

When I started out to redesign the garden it was not the long term planning or the hard work of transplanting plants or the heavy loads involved in building stone edges that worried me, it was the moles. I said then I will have to find a way to stop the moles from turning my new lawn into the catacombs of Rome.

That is exactly what is happening now. There seems to be one in the very back of my property, tunneling in their usual stomping ground, but this fall he, she or it, let’s call it it because I don’t know the sex, has also moved closer to the house and into the newly planted lawn. Off course moles love a soft, watered lawn, and after tilling the soil and sowing the seeds one has to water to make the seeds grow. Not so? Exactly what the mole doctor ordered. So what am I to do next?

Internet research tells me I have many choices but the tools available on the market produce little or limited results. Great! I have already tried the granules that are supposed to chase them away with the smell to an area I don’t mind them living. But that just infuriated the mole and it invaded another area of my yard and he dug twice as many tunnels as before. I am now trying the poison peanuts, but I have already noticed that after you killed one in a specific area another comes along a day or three later and claims the territory. Moles are very territorial. A few years ago I tried the mole traps, unsuccessfully I might add, my cat had much more success catching them than I, and research tells me moles are mostly too clever to get trapped by unprofessionals like me. So, it seems I either live with them or I turn into a Carl Speckler (Bill Murray), the obsessed golf-course-lawn-loving greens attendant in the movie, Caddyshack.

I don’t mind living with wild animals in the yard as long as they are beneficial and don’t give me additional work. I rather have a mole digging tunnels than picking up shit after a dog. Moles certainly are beneficial and good for my garden. They eat all the grubs and worms and other bugs that would normally attack plant roots. They are good for aerating the ground beneath lawns. So they are beneficial, but it’s the extra work they give me that I don’t want. Hell, that’s why I changed the garden, to have less work. I have noticed in the past that there where moles dig their tunnels the grass dies and moss or weeds take root in the open patches. But I don’t want a patchy looking lawn either so I will have to continuously seed and water (extra work) or fight them, which my logical brain tells me is rather futile because if I succeed this fall, they will be back next spring again.

In the mean time, I don’t know when to give up and I still have some fight left in me. So, Mr. or Mrs. Mole, I am not going to become Carl Speckler, but I am going to give you my best shot.

To be continue…

PS: January 10, 2007, East Germany.

A 63-year-old man's extraordinary effort to eradicate moles from his property resulted in a victory for the moles. The man pounded several metal rods into the ground and connected them - not to household current, which would have been bad enough - but to a high-voltage power line, intending to render the subterranean realm uninhabitable. Coincidentally, the maneuver rendering the surface of the ground uninhabitable as well, electrifying the very ground on which he stood. He was found dead some time later, at his holiday property on the Baltic Sea. Police had to trip the main circuit breaker before venturing onto the property.

Rumor has it they figured out the time of death by looking at his electric bill later.

Courtesy: http://erictrickster.blogspot.com/.