High Altitude Gardening - Environment, Animals

We have an animal that I was not familiar with back east - pocket gophers. A pocket gopher is brown and about 4 inches long. It digs tunnels in the ground about 6 inches from the surface and also has chambers for sleeping and breeding much deeper down. The pocket gopher excavates the soil from its tunnels into numerous round mounds of loose soil. When the pocket gopher comes up to feed, it digs a hole in one of its soil mounds and emerges from its burrow. After feeding, the pocket gopher recloses its tunnel with freshly dug soil.

Pocket gophers feed on grasses, roots, and tubers. They love my garden and especially like peas. One day, while sitting on my deck about 200 feet from my vegetable garden, I noticed a pea plant about 3 feet long seem to wiggle and then be pulled down into the ground, eventually disappearing. A pocket gopher was pulling the plants into his tunnel and eating them. I am amazed at how much a single pocket gopher can eat! Fences are useless in controlling pocket gophers for obvious reasons. We prefer not to put out poisoned bait as other harmless animals may also be killed. Traps have proven useless. For two years, I used a "ground vibrator" that effectively kept the pocket gophers out of my garden but they grew accustomed to it.

The picture shows our solution to pocket gophers. Jack took a mustard container and fastened a rubber hose to its end. He places common household cleaners that react with each other in the container and closes it tightly. He then places the hose into a pocket gopher tunnel and opens the container top. Gas flows down into the tunnel system and kills the pocket gopher. Note: This can be very dangerous to humans also. When the household cleaners are mixed, the reaction starts immediately and pressure builds in the mustard bottle. The bottle could burst if the pressure is not quickly relieved. Also, the gas produced is very toxic to humans.

Jack found he had to attach the rubber hose quite tightly to the mustard container. The first time he tried this method, the pocket gopher, probably irritated by the gas, pulled the hose off of the mustard container and hid it in his tunnel system. We did not find the rubber hose until we tilled the garden in the fall.