Protecting Your Vegetable Garden from Voles

Last year we had a pretty bad problem with groundhogs and voles destroying our vegetable gardens. In our area…there aren’t many natural predators to take care of them, so we had an abundance of both running around and living in our backyard! They destroyed hundreds of dollars worth of garden plants and vegetables in just 2 short months!

After doing some research we learned a few things about Voles which really seemed to help. Here’s what we learned, perhaps it will help some of you who may be battling the same problem.

1. The love to eat grass, weeds and vegetables. Keep your grass mowed and get rid of weeds as much as possible!

2. Place a fence around your garden. We fenced in 2 of our smaller vegetable gardens and next year we’ll be fencing in the larger one too. The fencing doesn’t need to be 6 foot high, we used chicken wire about 3 1/2 foot to 4 foot high.

3. You can opt to trap them and relocate them to another area. We purchased a small, humane trap from Amazon and baited it with creamy peanut butter. Hubby successfully caught and released at least a dozen last summer in a new area 5 miles away.

4. A local gardening center sells red fox urine and we sprayed that around the perimeter of our yard. The only drawback to that was…it can be expensive and after it rains or you water the garden you’ll need to reapply it.

5. If you have an outdoor cat or dog…let them roam around your garden. Their urine and scent can scare voles away. Better yet, if your cat is a natural “mouser” let them catch and kill the voles naturally. Hey, it’s part of the natural food chain. Sadly, neither one of these were an option for us.

The photo in my post is of a newborn baby vole that my husband accidentally dug up. He was digging up sweet potatoes last fall and came across a den of baby voles. He didn’t have the heart to kill them so he scooped up all of the babies, caught the Mom and relocated them to another area at the back of our property.

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