There’s nothing worse than spending your spring nurturing your lawn to drive out the last weeds and create a green carpet that covers your property, only to walk outside one morning and see several mounds of dirt spread out from your front porch to the sidewalk. What this means, of course, is that you have a gopher village under construction beneath your lawn, and if you want to protect your new green rug, you will have to move quickly. If you’ve taken some steps to prevent gophers from coming in, you’ve saved yourself a major headache and some people opt to use gopher control methods with electronics.
Do you have a wooded area near your home? If so, put some owl boxes in the trees. Owls like eating gophers, and if you have owls patrolling the area, gophers will find other lawns for their construction projects. If there aren’t any groves near you, you can invest in a large bird bath, or another shallow vessel with water. Several varieties of hawks will take residence, and they enjoy gophers as well. If you think badgers or raccoons might try to enjoy the water, make sure to raise it way above the ground.
Gophers can use low-level greenery to hide from their predators. The more shrubs, weeds and bushes you have in your yard, the more hiding places the rodents will have. If you go along your fence lines and get rid of the weeds and small bushes, the hawks and owls you’ve invited to the neighborhood will have an easier time seeing the gophers before they can start digging.
Gophers don’t really like mulch. If you have a garden within your lawn, or specially landscaped areas, you can spread mulch around them to keep gophers from getting interested. You can also line any elevated beds with hardware cloth to block the tunnels. Bury the cloth two feet below the surface for maximum effectiveness. You can also put the hardware cloth vertically in the ground at the property lines to keep tunnels from entering your lawn from beneath. Keep the trench two feet deep, and slide the hardware cloth in, down along your property lines.
Put your pets to work for you. Gophers are their busiest at dawn and dusk, so put your pets outside at those times of day. Cats and dogs don’t like gophers, and so they will drive them away so they can’t dig holes in the ground.
Taken together, these steps will help you keep gophers out of your lawn. Just because the gophers want to build a town doesn’t mean they have to put it up in your front yard!
Good luck with Keeping gophers out of the lawn!
