Gophers
Gophers have always been a problem, a few here, a few there, but a few years ago, for the first time the problem the problem reached comic proportions. It got so bad that the Garden docents would e-mail me with reports of brazen daylight gopher sightings. Such behavior had heretofore been unheard of, as reports of the murderous staff horticulturists going after them with the lawnmowers, and secateurs must surely have spread through the grapevine
I’d feel a rush of uncontrollable rage at discovering plants that had been in the collection for a quarter century disappearing overnight. Entire beds lay suspended above a super-highway of gopher tunnels. The gophers no longer felt the need to throw new piles of tunnel tailings above the surface. They could simply shift between different streets on their subterranean grid. The traps I set were much like Berkeley’s traffic calming concrete bollards…utterly ineffective.
Extreme measures came to mind, and yet my ecological conscience overcame my “forward leaning” gopher policy. My inner superpower wanted to nuke the whole coastal bed complex, but cooler heads prevailed. Considering the impacts the application gopher bait might eventually have on the fox kits, owls and other critters I enjoyed in the garden strengthened my resolve to solve the issue without the application of pesticides. Continued careful setting of traps, rubbed with snippets of favorite gopher foods like the roots of California poppies eventually did the job.
