[VRWCmember]

Call Carl Spackler!

Anybody home? Hello Mr. Gopher

I smell Varmint poontang

[Zavien Doombringer]

[dd5339]

Sitting on the back deck with a Ruger 77/22 22 caliber rifle might take care of the problem!

Semper Fi

[Corin Stormhands]

Send 'em to Congress.

[Abe Froman]

My dad is the incarnation of Carl Spackler......he once set himself on fire trying to kill gophers under our front step. He ended up with second-degree burns on his inner thighs.

[Michael Barnes]

Send a ferret down the holes?

[rontorr]

Bill Murray had the most effective way, but there is no good method. I tried lots of stuff, but the only way we got them out of the field was to flood irrigate, then they just went uphill, and came back a few weeks later

[ETERNAL WARMING]

I understand Whirlagigs work. You know those tacky pinwheels that spin around in the wind? Supposedly the vibration is transferred into the ground via the stem and the gophers hate it and leave. You need one with a metal stem, tho. Then treat your ground to kill insects. They go after grubs, etc in the soil.

[Dust in the Wind]

What kind of poison? Do you have access to "Phostox"? If you don't know what I'm refering to you don't have the license as it is restricted. Gasoline will work but you do not light it. Just pour about 4-8 ounces down the hole then cap it with newpaper and dirt. Both of these methods are using toxic fumes or gas to attack your problem. The first involves phosphene which is very deadly to anything that requires breathing oxygen. And it is quick (less than 5 min).

[Tijeras_Slim]

I've been using the Black Hole Trap on my land. I've killed about 50 pocket gophers so far, including 6 in one day. When fresh digging is detected, I probe with a long screwdriver to determine the direction of the tunnel then dig down and place one trap facing each direction. If you don't catch any within a day or so, move to another area.

[cgk]

My dad buried empty beer bottles up to their necks, leaving the "mouth" exposed so the wind would blow across it. The whistling/vibrating it caused in the ground caused the gophers to relocate.

[Auntie Mame]

My friend got rid of her gophers by pouring animal urine down the holes. I'm trying to remember what animal..... maybe dog? Anyway, my first concern would be how to collect the urine. ..... Maybe it was horse urine. Tell you what, I'll write and ask her. I can personally verify that her gophers are gone and they were really bad for a while.

Note: I once had a huge backyard and boarded three dogs back there for almost two years. No gophers. The dogs went back to their homes and shortly thereafter gophers appeared, eventually turning my backyard into their own personal playground.

I have also heard that putting dry ice down the holes works but have no experience.

[Auntie Mame]

Just heard from my friend about how she got rid of her gophers. Are you ready? In her own words:

"Every time [the dog] went poop, instead of throwing the poop away in the trashcan, I stuffed it into the holes! Then I put more water in them to flush the poop down farther down into the tunnels. Well, that fixed the little SOBs. No more gopher holes."

Hope you have a dog or it might be really embarrassing asking your dog owning neighbors and friends for their help.

[Kevmo]

Reporting on some progress I’ve made on the gophers in my yards.

I did an internet search and there’s a lot of information on how to get rid of gophers. I wanted a simple, cheap, fast method. I buy the poisoned pellets every year but they don’t seem to work very well any more. I think I figured out why — gophers have an excellent sense of smell and can pick up the scent.

I was impressed with the vast array of approaches and I tried the road flares because that was the most fun. I saw the smoke bombs available at Home Depot and read that the active ingredient is sulfur dioxide, which is the same gas that is put out by road flares for 1/5 the price. Whenever I find a hole I just pop a section of road flare down it and bury the flare. It’s cool looking. I notice that it works better when I run the water hose down the hole at the same time; the combination gives them more than they can handle.

I do think the variations of combinations are the key — change up the juicy fruit and poison pellets with fox urine and flares, throw in a propane bomb or just a hose hooked up to your exhaust to generate Carbon Monoxide; put down peppers or castor oil or kitty litter or whatever they don’t like. Buying a snake sounds like it really works. Pour gasoline or ammonia down the hole. Plant the Euphorbia lathyris (a.k.a. gopher plant, mole weed, myrtle spurge, wild caper, caper bush and spring wort) which contains a caustic sap that repels gophers to a distance of 10 feet.

I’ve heard the buggers are lazy and will reuse their runs so I started putting poison pellets down in small baggies into their holes. I don’t know if it works. Knowing their sense of smell is acute, I smothered my gloves in carrot juice and then wrapped the pellets in plastic (they just chew right through my ground cover plastic so it’s useful to reuse that) and then shove the long, thin offering into the hole through a pipe.

I also heard animal urine works. But fox urine, called “Shake away” is expensive. So I dug a trench and pissed in it a few times and then covered it up. It felt good to be pissing on their heads... hah hah. I don’t know how well this worked.

I haven’t tried juicy fruit gum. Sounds fun.

Here’s a trick that I use that I don’t see anywhere else. I buy torch-apply roofing material and lay it on the ground as a temporary path way. It’s very rugged, simple, keeps weeds away and the gophers can’t chew through it. Even though they chewed through the ground cover plastic in dozens of places, there was not one bite of this torch-app TP4 roofing material. In the areas where I don’t care that the gophers operate, this stuff works fine and their dirt doesn’t get everywhere. Eventually when I pull up the material, I find a gopher run underneath it, so I can find where the entry or exit holes are and start laying down flares.

http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/pests/msg010831127138.html

http://icwdm.org

http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/index.html
http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/PMG/PESTNOTES/pn7433.html

How do I kill moles/gophers in an urban environment?
http://www.calguns.net/calgunforum/archive/index.php/t-116232.html

As a side note, I finally got the upper hand on the squirrel population by using a soft pellet gun. When the gun jammed, I returned it and now I just use a sling shot. It harrasses them and they want to leave the area. Fine with me. If they stay, I get some target practice. If they leave, I get to eat my peaches from my tree. There’s some simple technology that doesn’t jam. Today I noticed a squirrel nest just above my roof line so I went up to inspect it, and was surprised to see a little rat-like head poking out. I had a garden instrument with me and tried to whack the little bugger but he was too fast.