 Do we need to be afraid of gophers and moles in the garden, or can we take advantage of the unique skills in order to improve our soil? I'm Matt, coming at you from Farm For All, and in this video I'm going to look at some of the techniques that I use in order to essentially herd gophers and moles around the garden so that they can improve our heavy clay and rock-filled soil while protecting my plants at the same time. Let's do it. Why do people have such an antagonistic relationship with gophers and moles? For some it's aesthetic, with all of these little mounds of soil popping up all over the lawn and garden, it can be a bit of an eyesore. Stay tuned to the end of the video and I hope I can convince you to relax your prejudices just because of how beneficial these animals can be. The thing that's on more of our minds, I'm sure, is, ah, they're eating my plants! I've got a solution for that. But first, let's take a look at why exactly our soil conditions are creating the conditions that are right for gophers and moles to begin with. Think about it, you can't make tunnels in light and airy soil, it just collapse. If you're seeing signs of gophers and moles, what you need to understand is that you have enough soil compaction to support their tunnels, and that's ultimately the problem we're trying to solve. So how exactly do gophers improve the soil? As you can see right here, they do a pretty good job of relieving compaction. Check out how nice and loose this is compared to even just the hard ground right next to it. Because most of this decompaction is happening underground, it's preserving the plant life and mulch that's on the surface of the soil. And unlike with traditional tilling, you don't end up with a very fine, dusty layer of soil on the top, which ends up just getting re-compacted and even compacted worse any time it rains or irrigation is applied. The second thing that's improved by these tunnels is water infiltration. Typically with hard compacted soils, the water just runs off the soil surface and doesn't get down to your plant's roots where it can do some good. With these tunnels, the water sinks right in, gets down to the root level and ultimately recharges groundwater. Just like we typically do with larger earthworks like swales and ponds, in this case we're doing it on a micro level. Third of all, rodents poop. A lot. If you've ever kept rabbits or guinea pigs, you know that they poop a lot and you probably also know that their poop is one of the best fertilizers that money can buy. That is, you can find anyone who's willing to part with something so amazing for something as pedestrian as cash. So that's what gophers and moles do to improve soil. They relieve compaction, they infiltrate water and they increase fertility. But what about the elephant in the room? How do we keep them from destroying our plants? First of all, we can track the direction that gophers and moles are headed because every few days amount of soil will appear and the newest one is going to have a hole just like this one. And so we can figure out where the mole is now versus where it came from and use that to determine the general direction that they're headed in. What I've discovered is that if they're heading towards a plant that we want to protect, there are a couple of easy techniques to encourage them to change direction. For starters, we want to find the hole that's heading towards the plants we want to protect and we just want to stomp the soil back into it to refill it. And the other thing we want to do is apply our secret ingredient. If you already watched my previous video on protecting germinating peas, then you already know what that secret ingredient is, urine. I already explained in that other video why urine is so powerful as a deterrent for small animals. I'll go ahead and link that video at the end so you can watch it if you haven't already. It's a game changer with moles and gophers. I have this young blueberry right here that my gopher friend was heading right towards and I know it's kind of hard to tell now that we've come in and molested it this past weekend, but I used this technique and I don't know if you can see it now, but there are all these holes here that the gopher left as it was moving away from the blueberry. So this technique totally worked to discourage them from hanging out over here next to my plants. I've got this blueberry here, some strawberries, another blueberry, way back there I've got a honeyberry and some multiplier onions and almond, definitely stuff that I don't want him not on the roots of. So let's put why this works into terms that we can understand as humans. Imagine you're working on a big project, maybe you're writing something big for work or working on spreadsheets or editing video, some big project and your computer crashes and you lose hours and hours or days worth of work. How eager are you to jump right back in and do that work all over again? If you're like me, not very eager. You need at least a couple of days to just take a breather then you can jump back in and do it. The other thing, imagine you're going on a hike and imagine you're seeing lots of signs of cougar activity or worse there have been reports of cougar attacks on humans. If you know that they're in an area, how likely are you to go hike there? Probably not very likely. You're going to choose a safer spot. That's basically what we're accomplishing with these techniques. First of all, we're making it a waste of their time to put tunnels where we don't want them. We're going to smash them in anywhere that they put them that we don't want them. By creating a clear boundary that they can smell and learning to associate that smell with getting their tunnels smashed in, they're going to avoid anything that we've clearly designated as ours. It's basic. It takes a lot of work to dig these tunnels and it requires lots of food and energy to do it. So they don't want to do work that's just going to end up going to waste. To reiterate, gophers improve soil compaction, water infiltration and even soil fertility and we can take advantage of these unique skills by leaning on the inherent laziness and fear of all animals. While the gopher might be annoyed and inconvenienced by our actions, they at least get to live another day and we can live in harmony with them while enjoying all of the benefits that they provide. I'm Matt here at Farm For All. I hope this video has been helpful and thank you for watching. Subscribe to the channel now for future permaculture experiments and then select one of these videos to continue the journey.