cooking for vermin

It’s been a bad year for pocket gophers. I’ve been clean­ing up the gar­den for our annual big July 4th party, deal­ing with gopher dam­age and gen­er­ally get­ting every­thing pretty-like. One large spot in the front–just about the first zone of the gar­den vis­i­tors will encounter–is totally bare and calls out for some new plants to fill in the space. But the last thing I wanted to do is to install some­thing new that would turn into expen­sive gopher chow.

I decided that I would try to place some new plants in the dead zone, but wanted to see if I couldn’t try some­thing to deter the gophers. Gopher bait pel­lets are pop­u­lar, but I can’t say that they’ve worked for me. How can you tell if some­thing is work­ing when the crea­ture you’re after lives 99.9% of the time under­ground and their dam­age seems to come in ran­dom spurts? And I worry about the cat dis­cov­er­ing a poi­soned gopher. Gopher-killing traps are pop­u­lar, and it’s the one method that seems to have the best chance at suc­cess. Still I’m not sure I’m ready to go there.

I’ve tried cas­tor bean-based repel­lant. I’ve tried blood meal. Both things that are sup­posed to keep the crea­tures at bay, but I don’t know that they’ve worked for me for longer than a few days. And the idea of spread­ing blood meal fer­til­izer around native plants at the start of what’s sum­mer dor­mancy for many of them didn’t seem like too bright an idea. (Let me force feed you some bratwurst while you’re try­ing to get to sleep…) One thing I haven’t tried is chili powder.

I admit that this is just an exper­i­ment, maybe one that’s doomed to fail. The only things I have going on my side are the facts that, 1) there’s at least one com­mer­cial prod­uct out there that com­bines blood meal with chili pow­der, and 2) you some­times see ref­er­ences on gopher con­trol using chili, usu­ally in com­bi­na­tion with some­thing like gar­lic. Since I don’t want to do blood meal, the chili pow­der alone might do some­thing.

And if chili pow­der might work, why not use the most industrial-strength stuff you can your hands on? It’s not pep­per spray, but the local Indian gro­cer sells 880 grams of extra-hot ground pep­per for less than five dollars–less than half the price for the blood-meal/chili mix­ture I’ve seen. I cook with the stuff, but a half tea­spoon will make a large batch of food siz­zle and scare away most of my Ohio rel­a­tives. It might work for gophers, too.

So, into the plant­ing holes I mixed up a recipe of soil mixed with gen­er­ous amounts of the chili pow­der, about 1 quar­ter cup per hole. Next, into the holes go the three new San Miguel Island buck­wheats. They’re not the most exotic of the Cal­i­for­nia native plants, but I was pretty happy to find sev­eral well grown exam­ples in a local gen­er­al­ist nurs­ery. If you see a busi­ness doing some­thing good, why not sup­port them?

Finally the plants got a healthy top-dressing of the chili pow­der. What I didn’t use on the new plants I spread around a few other plants that seem to be favorite gopher menu items. This is how it looks before water­ing it in, pretty glar­ingly orange-red. It looks closer to nor­mal after you soak it in a bit.

One Big Cau­tion: Although chili pow­der is a nat­ural prod­uct, it’s still a nasty irri­tant. Wear gloves. A res­pi­ra­tor and gog­gles might be a good addi­tion on a windier day. I’m not say­ing this for dra­matic effect. Wind blew some in my eyes and I suf­fered the expected effect–no sur­prise. But I also rubbed my gloves on the side of my face, only to have my face burn like a sec­ond degree sun­burn for half an hour.

Will all this fail and col­lapse into a pile of chili pow­der induced flames? Dunno, but it’ll be an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment.

June 21 2011 06:30 am | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • •

12 Responses to “cooking for vermin”

  1. Wendy on 21 Jun 2011 at 8:39 am #

    Wow — that’s some seri­ous look­ing stuff! ha ha ha!

  2. Sue Langley on 21 Jun 2011 at 12:21 pm #

    lol! Ohio rel­a­tives…
    Let’s hope your gophers don’t enjoy their new ‘treats’ I once watched as a gopher popped up time after time to grab every leaf of a dandelion…and once saw a 8″ tall Wytheia plant twist­ing and wav­ing and it slowly dis­ap­peared into the ground.
    The exper­i­ment sounds real good. Good luck!

  3. kate/high altitude gardening on 22 Jun 2011 at 8:26 am #

    Oh, I’m lik­ing this idea! Around here we call them ‘pot guts’ and they are crazy-busy destroy­ing my gar­den this sum­mer. I’d love to foil their plans with a few bags of this stuff. :)

  4. Elephant's Eye on 23 Jun 2011 at 6:53 am #

    About fire and fyn­bos and chap­ar­ral? Inva­sive alien Port Jack­son wat­tle, euca­lyp­tus and pines blaze too hot for the fyn­bos seeds. Fyn­bos does need to burn, but not as often as idiots dis­card­ing cig­a­rette ends, or arson­ists, ‘think’!

  5. Cindy on 24 Jun 2011 at 3:36 am #

    If you have room in your life, con­sider get­ting the right good-sized dog. I watched my parent’s ger­man shep­herd mix sneak up on a ground­hog and take it out with a few quick shakes. Very ele­men­tal, but effective.

    This is dan­ger­ous writ­ing ter­ri­tory, how­ever. My sister-in-law blogged about trap­ping a ground­hog and releas­ing it else­where. She received so many com­ments about the harm these ani­mals cause in the coun­try (their holes can break cows’ legs) and how she should have killed it that she had to take her post down.

    Ground­hogs seem to inspire par­tic­u­larly high emo­tion in the world of var­mits. I love Michael Pollin’s account of con­sid­er­ing dri­ving one out with gaso­line and a match.

  6. lostlandscape on 24 Jun 2011 at 10:16 pm #

    Wendy, so far so good, but it’s only been a week…

    Sue, like you I’ve seen a few plants move around, ani­mated by unseen forces below. If you don’t know what’s hap­pen­ing it can be a tad unsettling…

    Kate, “pot guts” huh? Love the name, but I’m sorry you’re hav­ing to con­tend with their dam­age. You must be doing some­thing right, though, if you’re grow­ing irre­sistibly tasty plants.

    EE, so you have the same issues with unthink­ing mem­bers of the human species down where you are? I wish the real­iza­tion that humans are alike wher­ever you go came out of a more pos­i­tive thing the species has done…

    Cindy, my cat has come inside the house with a cou­ple, though at the time I didn’t know they were gophers and let them go. In her mid­dle age she’s more inter­ested in sleep­ing in the gar­den than look­ing for inter­est­ing rodents. I can see how this could be a touchy sub­ject. There was a long thread about pocket gophers on my local native plant list­serv where you saw the whole spec­trum of reac­tions aired. Inter­est­ingly, even though it was a group of folks ded­i­cated to native plant species, there wasn’t much sym­pa­thy for this native rodent.

  7. ricki on 25 Jun 2011 at 1:22 pm #

    Oh please…follow up with a progress report. Many of us are desperate!

  8. andrea @grwhryrpltd on 27 Jun 2011 at 6:59 pm #

    i like how there’s a graphic of a deer, or some other antlered crea­ture, on the pack­ag­ing of your gourmet chili deter­rent. per­haps that’s a good indi­ca­tion of other four-legged crea­tures it can work on… let us know how it works.

  9. Breathing Treatment (Brent) on 30 Jun 2011 at 1:11 pm #

    I’ve found that some natives are nat­u­rally not attrac­tive to gophers, buck­wheats among them. Other natives I’ve found that gophers like to avoid are Matil­ija pop­pies and sages.

    This makes sense since gophers are native to Cal­i­for­nia and the evo­lu­tion­ary pres­sure would have been towards mit­i­gat­ing gopher predation.

    On the other hand, the Chan­nel island ori­gin Lavat­era assur­gen­ti­flora, may not have suf­fered pre­da­tion in its island home since it seem to be a favorite gopher snack.

  10. Sue Langley on 30 Jun 2011 at 1:30 pm #

    James, how are the buck­wheats? I hap­pen to plant a red buck­wheat right over a big gopher hole or bur­row and have been watch­ing it like a hawk ever since read­ing your post. I haven’t used any prevention,…using Brett’s method, plant­ing things they don’t find tasty.…and won­der­ing if that works..time will tell, but am won­der­ing about yours.

  11. James on 01 Jul 2011 at 9:00 pm #

    Ricki and Sue, so far so good. No gopher activ­ity that I can see so far. But I’ll give it more time to con­sider it a suc­cess since I haven’t seen gopher activ­ity any­where in the gar­den since I sprin­kled the chilli pow­der around. I’ll do a for­mal fol­lowup soon.

    Andrea, interesting…I won­der how deer would react to the chile!

    Brent, in my gar­den the gophers do seem to leave some of the natives alone. I don’t have Matil­ija pop­pies, but the sages do seem to be avoided. The two buck­wheats species I had in the front gar­den don’t seem immune, though. My Saint Catherine’s lace started out grow­ing really well, but the last two years it’s looked awful and I think gophers are involved. The nearby plants of E. arborescens now are the site of the biggest piles of dirt around the gopher ven­ti­la­tion shafts. They look bet­ter than the E. gigan­teum, but I think that they’ve been slowed down, hav­ing barely grown larger in two years.

  12. [ Lost in the Landscape ] » random updates on 15 Jul 2011 at 12:49 pm #

    […] Update #1: The gopher chron­i­cles (Orig­i­nal post: Cook­ing for Vermin) […]

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