What digs round shallow holes in your yard?

Answer 1

"Moles" looking digging many shallow holes at night, looking for those red earthworms I bought in San Francisco garden nursery store. The box of red worms ($19.65) said that these worms live close to the surface, unlike the native grey worms, who burrow deep. "They aerate and fertilize the surface soil, beneficial to your topsoil!" I see these worms on surface at night, red & beautiful, clean & sleek, almost dry crawling all around among the vegetable plants looking for dead fruit flies, some rotten leaves... enjoying the night air, alone in the moon. What neat pets!

Suddenly, I awake one morning to SHALLOW HOLES dug in my garden!! For weeks I thought it was the racoons, seen often in my yard, coming from the wilds of Golden Gate Park 2 blocks away; stealing at night, with their masked burglar faces, to STEAL all of my gold fish and my one prize coy fish from my pond! Swimmers they are, diving under the boulder where the terrified fish hid.

Round holes, 2" deep, and 3-6" wide, dirt thrown outside the planter box onto the patio cement. Seedling carrots, turnips, and beets scattered or their leaves burried in 2" of soil! The "Mole" not interested in eating the tender 3" seedlings, not interested in the gourmet organic leafy rooty snacks he uprooted and abandoned so. My planter box is 8' x 14' x 2', sitting on the cement patio. I made it of huge split tree trunks, roughly; so the "Moles" (Gophers, you say? I'll know if and when one of my 3 spike pinching traps CATCHES one of them!!)-- Because the websites mostly say Gophers don't eat worms, so why would they dig shallow holes.

The "moles" entered the raised planterbox at first by digging holes at the corner, where the logs left gaps as they joined at 90 degrees. The patio-scurrying invaders would dig a hole up at a sharp angle from the cement to the surface of the garden box, then run around on the surface digging their many shallow holes. They never yet dug any underground tunnels in the planter box, but there is one such hole, going straight down at least 2', at the edge of the cement, 8' away from the planter box. That's the hole I flooded by sticking my garden hose in it and turning it on full force. In 3 mins, the hole seemed full of water, and the water level came up to the surface, and I turned it off. I hoped this would "discourage" them. Instead they dug 5 times as many SHALLOW HOLES than they had before! WAR!

Because all the websites I read said gophers eat only plants, not worms or insects, and only one website said they eat worms, MY VOTE FOR THE DIGGER OF SHALLOW HOLES IS MOLES.

--Albert Hannum, e-mail hannum7@Yahoo.com

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