Re: Moles, Voles or the like

From: hesterc at niven.acpub.duke.edu (Clarence Hester) on 1997.05.19 at 20:27:48(761) Al- I have a similar ongoing problem. It seems the moles and voles always go for the most expensive plants. I don't buy that theory about castor beans, frittilaria imperialis, etc. supposedly detering small rodents; that's a bunch of crapola in my experience, although it is universal propoganda in the gardening lore (it's certainly disproven in my garden, as they actually eat Frittilaria imperialis and pay no mind to castor beans). Nonetheless, I've never had them bother my alocasia macrorhizas, xanthosomas or any similar plants. Something (I suspect a vole) *did* eat big chunks out of the bottom of the corms and a lot of the roots from two unusual bananas I was growing ("Praying Hands" and "Thousand Finger"). Oddly, it didn't eat the "Brazilian" or "Burro" banana corms/roots. I solved the problem by purchasing very large plastic containers (whiskey barrel size) that I sunk fully into the ground, replanting the bananas within these. This seemed to stop them. Perhaps they prefer to tunnel laterally and stopped when they hit the plastic (?). For whatever reason, they never tried to burrow in from the top. Clarence

Note: this is a very old post, so no reply function is available.