How to prevent voles in your vegetable garden NATURALLY!

NATURAL. SIMPLE. QUICK. Here are 3 ways to keep voles out of your raised beds or vegetable garden.

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There is nothing quite as frustrating as planting out your garden and coming back to tunnels and mounds created by voles, moles, mole rats and gophers. In this video we look at 3 effective ways to prevent voles in your vegetable garden naturally through barriers, the wind and using a very specific plant!

Video timeline

00:00 – Introduction
01:52 – How to identify vole damage
03:39 – What to do with vole tunnels
04:35 – Preventing voles using a plant
05:56 – Preventing voles using the wind
07:38 – Preventing voles using barriers
10:46 – Making sure voles stay out of the garden

When it comes to keeping voles, gophers and mole rats out the garden, prevention is always the most effective treatment. By preventing voles from accessing your growing space or vegetable beds you are deterring them naturally so birds of prey, and other predators, can still catch and eat them.

The first thing that you need to do is make sure you actually have a vole problem. Voles are much smaller than Gophers or mole rats and have small tunnels that slightly lift the soil in your beds – just enough to cause damage to your plants! Moles on the other hand come from much deeper under the ground and push soil up, rather than tunnel along the top.

Learning how to keep voles out of vegetable gardens is one of the simplest and most valuable things you can do. It takes very little time and requires no chemicals or poisons – just clever and logical thinking.

Once you know you have a vole problem its time to implement preventative measures to keep voles out of your garden and these range from planting very specific plants that have strong smells that keep voles away, using the wind and then creating barriers to keep voles out of your raised beds.

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#voles #moles #vegetablegarden

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into starting your seedlings or planting
your seeds getting your beds prepared
next minute
the soil is raised you have tunnels
everywhere you have mounds of soil and
your seeds don’t germinate and sometimes
your seedlings have disappeared
this is one of the big challenges when
it comes to Growing your own food being
able to identify what is busy plague in
your garden and what you can do to
prevent it from happening again this
video and in this specific instance I
know it’s a vole and this vole is busy
coming for the freshly prepared bed and
all those new tender roots that are busy
coming out of the newly planted beds
because there are a few things that I
didn’t do which I’ve done with my other
Beds which is a great opportunity to
share with you what you can do to stop
these pesky little animals from getting
into your bed and destroying all of your
hard work
we have admitted this is very
frustrating but it doesn’t need to be
too frustrating because there are ways
to stop this from happening
the first thing we need to do is
identify that we’re actually dealing
with moles voles Gophers mole rats which
one are we actually dealing with because
the way you treat them is differently or
prevent them at least
in my instance I know it’s a vole
firstly because the dogs have caught
quite a few
but I don’t really want them in these
beds digging everything up to catch them
they’re in the rest of the Garden on the
grass small grass area and they’ve
actually caught them and they’re quite
small that is the first giveaway that on
my side it’s a vault Gophers are pretty
big
um mole rats are also much bigger than
voles and then moles are quite big
especially where we are here in Cape
Town we’ve actually got the the golden
mole golden sand Mall Sand Dune moles
and they have huge mouths that they
create
this is not the case here
um what we are looking at is a vole and
the way that you tell is you can see all
of these little tunnels they’re not
lifting the soil they’re simply raising
it slightly and you’ll see little cracks
on the soil sometimes but more often
than not it’s just a slight little raise
in the soil but what it is doing which
is why it’s so important to treat it is
it’s creating a little air pocket small
because they’re quite small what that
air pocket is doing as soon as the roots
of the plants grow they then dangle in
the air and we all know what happens
when roots are exposed to the air they
die off that’s why you have air pruning
pots so what we want to do is know that
it’s them so we know what to do but then
secondly is we need to gently re-compact
the soil because we need to reduce that
air pocket to make sure the plants when
they The Roots expand but they’re
actually expanding into soil and not
into nothing
so we’re going to compress it and then
what we’re going to look at is a few
things firstly we’re going to look at
using plants as a preventative measure
then we’re going to look at barriers
we’re going to look at wind deterrent of
for me I’ve used one of each in
different places and all of them work
really well for me take this all with a
pinch of salt because what works for me
and my climate might not work for you
that’s why I am wanting to give you
multiple options so let’s have a look at
some of them and you can trial and test
and hopefully keep Vols mole rats all of
these out of your garden and enjoy an
immense amount of food now the very
first one I want to show you is the use
of plants now for me I have tried a lot
of things and they just have not worked
the only thing I have found to work is
this it is Wild Garlic if you crush the
leaves the smell
pungently like garlic
you can use these you can eat them fresh
you can use them in a lot of different
dishes
but this is not what’s deterring the
moles or the voles
it’s this you can see they have very
very thick dense root masses and these
roots hone of garlic
they are very very strong so all you do
is you plant these and you can see the
depth is I would say about 20 they quite
easily go 40 to 60 centimeters deep but
they also spread along the soil so this
one I have pulled out so that you can
see what it looks like but ultimately
roots go down and out so this is a
really great border or perimeter plant
and then if I dig down here
you can see I hope you can
The Roots spread out and it’s a really
good preventative measure for your
plants
the next one is mechanical
which is this little windmill here in
South Africa the guys sell these and
make them on the side of the road
everywhere you can pick them up for
quite a bargain and it’s basically a
whole bunch of metal
put together they have legs that you can
stick into the ground and when the wind
blows this makes quite a noise
and it vibrates quite a lot now I know
that vibration has been used in many
different applications and doesn’t is
said to not work
but I have found this to be quite
effective maybe it’s the combination of
squeaky noises the vibrations and the
actual noise that is transferred through
the four legs into the soil
but this bed behind me where you can see
there’s quite a lot of greenery this one
is sitting on the edge as the wind blows
it looks quite nice it vibrates it makes
a noise I haven’t got any bowls in this
bed yet and I don’t have any perimeter
plants like the wild garlic and I don’t
have any underground borders either
so this is something that has worked for
me and if you’re in South Africa
probably going to be able to find these
quite easily they look quite cool in the
garden especially when they’re busy
blowing in the wind but if you’re in
other countries around the world you
might struggle with something like this
and I would suggest finding that there’s
something finding something that is
quite mechanical like this quite noisy
not something that is highly techy or
like
ergonomic or anything like that old
school vibrations noise
and that I’m sure we’ll do the trick and
then the third and final thing you can
do is to put in a barrier now here you
have quite a few different options you
can look at something like a solid
barrier like a wooden plank or bricks
Stones rocks anything that you can put
underground that is solid that is going
to create an underground barrier so that
the voles small rats can’t get through
it it needs to be deep enough that
they’re not going to go underneath and
usually anything up to 20 centimeters is
enough you don’t want to dig meters down
then you start getting into mole
territory
but what you want to do is make sure as
these little buggers obviously scoping
out your garden that if they hit a rock
they’re just going to move along and you
see it quite often they will go all
around your bed following the perimeter
trying to find a way in
like I said this is just a wooden plank
from someone who was throwing away some
some decking I’m going to dig the depth
of this this is about 15 centimeters
wide I’m sorry High which is perfectly
fine so I’m going to dig a hole about 25
centimeters
and what that’s going to give is this
plus a little Gap the the voles aren’t
going to get through that Gap but it’s
going to give me a little bit more depth
things you can also use
chicken wire although that is going to
break down pretty quickly when it comes
to all the moisture rust all of that but
it will work and the voles will start
realizing there’s a barrier and it’ll
stay away
you can also use
um the plastic square or Diamond netting
which you can also use as a border all
the way underneath that’s quite
effective but it is adding Plastics into
your garden which over time might break
down might might release things so
that’s very much up to you to decide
but I find the most cost effective and
most effective way to do it is to find
rocks find bricks find cinder blocks
find old pieces of wood dig down and
simply add those in another thing is if
you have slightly raised or not slightly
if you have fully raised beds before you
make your bed
add a layer of something at the bottom
whether that is a mesh chicken wire and
grids whatever it might be make sure the
holes are small enough that they can’t
get through and what will that what will
happen there is the bowls and all these
little things will come up and they’ll
try and get underneath and they’ll hit
the barrier then you don’t need to worry
about perimeters because you are solving
the whole issue of them coming through
the bottom
but if you have a slightly raised bed
like this
you don’t necessarily want to be putting
anything at the bottom because then you
can’t grow things like carrots turnips
beets anything that has a Taproot with a
bulb because then they get tangled
around the base and as you pull them out
you end up breaking the plant which is
the feeding level purpose of growing
root crops so yes all in all perimeter
and prevention underneath is probably
going to be the most effective but as
I’ve shown you using wild garlic for me
also works and using something more
mechanical like a windmill those are for
instances that you already have
something in place and you haven’t done
anything to prevent
creepy crawlies from coming underneath
prevention is always better than trying
to figure out is this guy still inside
here I don’t know
and if that happens to you what you need
to do
get a chair get some coffee at night
time sit very quietly for quite a while
only a few hours with the headlamp on
and watch your soil if you see your soil
starts moving and lifting
then it’s inside but I have found the
little entrance and act an exit Tunnel
right in front of me which I’ve closed
it every day and the next morning it’s
raised so I figured out that the one
that’s in here leaves and comes back so
I’m going to close this off do it all
the way around and then I’m going to
watch it again to make sure that it
hasn’t found
some way to get back in or it hasn’t
left little friends behind
but yes I hope you learned something
from this I hope you can keep these
pesky little buggers out of your roots
and let your plants grow because you are
going to be keeping them out of your
garden if you enjoyed this please give
it a thumbs up please subscribe to my
journey where I’m going to continue to
share tips tricks insights all these
things like this and drop me a comment
if you’ve got any questions or if you’re
just generally frustrated by moles voles
rats Gophers in your garden
until next time happy growing
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