Critters! We had about 25% of our plants damaged by voles this year. Mostly they took some tubers off the plant, but left some too. Some insights:
Voles seem to prefer some varieties over others that are right next to them (of course, they don't eat the cheap ones).
Voles are sneaky, there is only a quarter-sized hole, no mound like a gopher would leave. Best give-away was spongy ground near the plant, where their tunnels were. Sometimes no sign at all, until the plant fell over, no root left, only stalk.
Voles love our hedgerows, they burrow under the grass there, so we have weed whacked all the ground cover to the dirt, leaving only the young trees and shrubs.
Voles really adore landscape cloth, we pulled it up out of the pathways in July when we became aware of the voles, and it was Vole City under there. Lots of shallow tunnels everywhere.
Traps work, but it's slow work, maybe one vole every 3-4 days, with a half-dozen traps.
Our cats are the best, several voles every week that I saw, per cat. We had two but now got two more barn kittens, free from the local shelter.
Castor oil concentrate did nothing, except spraying it around took off the writing on some of my labels.
Neem drench did nothing.
Tilling in 20lb of leftover ground fresh garlic and hot peppers did nothing
We know the potato farmers around us are using heavy poisons to protect their crops, but there is an eagle nest across the road from us, lots of hawks and owls too, so we won't do that, need our predators.
This year, we planted a yellow mustard cover crop (it's bitter) to till in and bought a 50lb bag of dried blood to repel them. We also planted wild garlic on all the fence lines. Also, we are clearing a 6ft border around the garden where nothing will be planted, on the advice of a seasoned truck farmer from Texas; this is so the prey birds can see the voles if they try to run across it. And we'll be tilling a couple times before planting, sadly. All in addition to the total of 4 cats.
We've heard that voles are "cyclic", that every 5-7 years they will be really bad, hope that's true. We never had a big problem until last season. But sure open to more suggestions if anyone knows something that works! Wondering if fish or kelp meal might help?
