What a shame. There might be some root tissue at the base that would strike easily if you pot up the plant without leaves.

We've had it happen too.
I'm paranoid about putting anything I really value into the ground "nekkid."

Believe it or not, I read a website which complained that the Western Pocket Gopher was not "appreciated." APPRECIATED????? Good grief!

Jeri

No gophers here, but the moles or the voles sure do love daffodil bulbs! Those bulbs are poisonous, but they are delicacies to those little critters. My cats, of course, wage war on them and do catch one occasionally. Brandy

Miss Brisa catches them. But there are far more gophers than she can catch.

Jeri

Chipmunks love bulbs too. I have given up on tulips and hyacinths. They even go after most daffodils (though not all).

Fortunately, chipmunks don't normally chew on roots, so their tunnels are just a nuisanse but don't kill my roses or shrubs.

Paula, this is not your fault, it's Freya's. Tell her she needs to stop sleeping so much and get to work.

I've seen gopher mounds even in my yard. Those guys have nothing to do but look for food.

Carol

I think if I had gophers I would maybe have to shoot them a little . LOL. And I am not an animal killer. I think in NC it is illegal to kill a vole. I'm sure gophers are illegal too. Paula, here I battle voles. I hope you can get cuttings from the rose.

Carla

That would make me crazy, seriously. Knock on wood, so far no varmits here other than the hawk that swoops down on my bird feeders looking for a meal. That makes me crazy too. I'm trying to figure out a way to shovel prune a hawk. :-)

Carol

All my life I've liked big, laid-back dogs. And small hyperactive dogs look good at someone else's. Except some-else's now have no voles or moles and darned few rabbits.
I hope you can control your varmints and I am so sorry for Barbara's Pasture Rose, which, if it's only half as good as its pictures (Jeri), is a must have.
When a good rose goes down, it's an exponential loss.
My condolences,
Ann

I am so sorry for Barbara's Pasture Rose, which, if it's only half as good as its pictures (Jeri), is a must have.
When a good rose goes down, it's an exponential loss.

*** It is that good.
If gophers are going to eat something, it should be -- oh -- Knockout!

Jeri

In California you can kill gophers. We trap them, but living next to a big open field as we do, there will always be a fresh supply moving in to our garden. Freya gets one now and they, and so do the owls, but they don't come up to the surface very frequently. We grow fruit and vegetables here so vermin of all kinds take a look and think it is the promised land.

Gophers are officially considered a serious agricultural pest here. They have even been known to carry plague. Every so often the west has a few cases of bubonic plague. I was surprised to learn this.

I'm going to see if my BPR will strike. If it doesn't root, then I will get another one from Barbara. I had regular La Reine and this one at the same time, and this one is definitely a superior clone.

Thanks for the sympathy. I knew fellow rose gardeners would understand.

Rosefolly

Yes, and we are on a hillside. The entire range of hills swarms with gophers.
You'd THINK the coyotes would cooperate and eat some of them, but nooooooooooo . . .

Jeri

I'm sorry Paula. We must be blessed here to not have a problem.

Rosefolly: Same thing happened to me last week. The gophers ate all the roots off my Strike it Rich even though it was planted in a cage. They did the same thing to Heaven on Earth; however, there's a bit of root left so I'm trying to save that rose. They also ate several new and healthy basal breaks from my Queen of Sweden, Molineux and Graham Thomas. I'm at a loss as to what to do. I don't do poison, because of all the hawks and owls that we have.

I have poured those granular mole and gopher repellant on the rose beds to see if they'll go away. I'll see if that works.

Jeff

Jeff, that's why we plant in 15-G squats, with many extra holes, sunk into the ground. Gophers have never yet chewed their way into one of those, tho we have seen them tunnel all AROUND the thing, looking for an entrance.

Jeri

Jeri: Thanks! What is a 15-G squat? I would like to do that if it prevents the gophers from going in.

Jeff

You know the standard black plastic nursery pots? A "squat" is one of those, that is wider than the normal ones -- "squattier."

We use a 3/4-in drill bit to put many, many extra holes in the pot. The more, the better. Then sink the pot in the ground, and plant inside it. Roots do eventually go out through the holes.
Roses do well this way -- but it seems to take a bit longer for them to really mature. Probably that's time spent finding a way to get the roots out of the pot into the ground. Gophers can never get in and cause real damage, tho, so I think that's an acceptable tradeoff.

One caution: If you have a Bermuda Grass problem, the Bermuda will find its way into the pot, and can grow in there around and around in circles, and eventually fill the entire pot. There is no remedy but to pull the thing up and bare-root it. (I HATE Bermuda Grass even more than I hate gophers.)

OH. 15-G is usually big enough, but we have put a few REALLY big roses into 20-G squats. That seems to be ideal, but requires a REALLY big hole.

Jeri

Jeri

Oh Jeri, you sure have me chuckling! I had some gophers in my yard once, but fortunately there was no serious damage to any of the roses, even though they had been in the rootzones of some.

I wish they would have chewed all my Knockouts. I wouldn't have had to pay somebody to get them out of here.

Sandy

Oh Sandy -- Don't you know, those little devils NEVER eat something you want to get rid of.

There are gophers, and then, there are gophers the way we get them sometimes, out here. There are miles of hillsides here, that are riddled with tunnels. In the El Nino flooding, in 1994, you could judge where the water was flooding through the tunnels, because periodically it reached a hole to the surface, and produced a fountain.
The problem -- and it was a SERIOUS problem -- was that the water hollowed out the tunnels, til some of them were close on 24 ins in diameter. And then the area above them was subject to collapse or land-slippage.
At the level we get them, gophers are not an annoyance, and they are more than a garden pest. They can be a serious agricultural, and even structural hazard.
And they WILL eat a rose right down to a stump, so that the plant will fall over if you touch it.

Jeri

Jeri: Thank you for the squat tip. I will be going to Home Depot to see if I can find them to plant my roses in. Gophers are a huge problem here; I would be walking along sometimes and the ground would sink. In one of my rose beds, the roses are failing to thrive because the gophers have so destabilized the ground that the roses are no longer firmly anchored, despite being planted in wire cages. Whenever I water, the ground around the roses would open up to reveal tunnels, and the water would simply flow away from the roses. I am thinking of replanting those roses in the squats that you suggested. I think this may be the solution that I've been looking for.

Thanks!

Jeff

May I add financial ruin to the reasons to hate gophers? One tunneled into one of my drip irrigation valve boxes, which are filled with gravel. The gravel lodged under one of the manual valve levers, wedging it permanently open. That valve happened to be a sprayer for a bed we use only seasonally for raise seed. We can't see that the sprayer is operating from the house, and we've been gone a lot. So...the bed was being sprayed 24-7. Of course, the rest of yard was getting no drip irrigation at all because the whole system is pressure-reduced and regulated. I couldn't understand what was wrong with my roses, why they looked so dry and terrible. Then I got the water bill. Think four figures for two months.

I did a variation of Jeri's method for the bed where I have my European OGR's. We took black plastic garbage cans and cut them in half crosswise, also cutting the bottom off. This gave me two planting cylinders open at the bottom for roots. Now they are each about 18 inches deep, and to be sure to prevent gophers you really want 24 inches, so I have been told. These are in a place that gophers find difficult to reach unless they come up on the surface. So far this bed has been safe.

Rosefolly

>> May I add financial ruin to the reasons to hate gophers?

*** That's AWFUL.
And we are actually concerned about their network of tunnels under our house.

Jeri

When it comes to deer, rabbits and other critters I often wonder if they would stop eating everyone's plants if one started to feed them instead of fight them. Like set out a head of lettuce somewhere where they'll find it but far enough where they'd leave the ornamentals alone. Has anyone tried that?

I love prairie dogs despite their obvious destructive tendencies- but since we don't have them wild in the area I guess I'm just naive. I loved them at the zoo though.

My mom will often to talk to the groundhogs that walk by the road though, she stops and goes like " HEY! HEY YOU! GET AWAY ( insert frantic hand gestures here) she thinks they're stupid but doesn't want to see them get hit either.

GOPHER STEW

6 lbs. gopher meat
1/4 lb. salt pork, cubed
3 Spanish onions, diced
5 stalks celery, diced
1 bell pepper, diced
3 (16 oz.) cans sliced tomatoes
10 c. water
2 datil peppers, whole
Salt and pepper to taste
3 potatoes, cubes
5 tbsp. brown flour
1/2 c. water

Clean gopher meat well and drain. Fry down salt pork in a large cast iron pot. Add meat and brown. Remove meat, drain on paper towels. Add onions, celery and bell pepper to salt pork grease and saute until tender. Add tomatoes and a little water if needed and cook down to a pulp on low heat for about 2 hours. Add gopher meat, 10 cups water and datil peppers and salt and pepper to taste. Cook about 1 1/2 hours or until meat is tender. Add potatoes the last 30 minutes of cooking. Mix brown flour with water in a glass jar and shake vigorously. Bring stew to a boil and thicken with flour mixture. Serve over UNCLE BEN'S® rice.

BROWN FLOUR:

1 cup flour

Place flour in a cast iron skillet on low heat and stir continuously until brown, being careful not to burn it.

Unfortunately, populations expand to fit resources. If you feed the wildlife, you get more wildlife, not happier wildlife that leave your garden alone. Food supply, epidemics (like that plague I mentioned before) and predators are what control the size of a population.

One of the reasons I trap gophers rather than poison them is because I don't want to run the risk of harming any predators that help to control the gophers (and the ground squirrels, too. We have both problems.) My dog's safety would probably lead me to this same decision, as would compassion about how I dispose of harmful animals, but really I want to be sure that any owls or snakes that eat gophers don't get killed. That would make the problem even worse.

Jeri and Berndoodle, those are serious problems indeed. They make losing a favorite rose seem trivial indeed. I wish you both luck in battling the dreaded gopher.

One of the reasons I trap gophers rather than poison them is because I don't want to run the risk of harming any predators that help to control the gophers

*** ABSOLUTELY.
The same is true of any other forms of rodentia. It's not just our dogs, or the kitties around here -- or even the coyotes -- I'm much more concerned about our raptors.

Jeri

Rosefolly,
We saved a young own -root rosebush, that my neighbors puppy dug up and chewed up, leaf, cane and roots. by potting what was left of the bush,which wasn't much, a rootball the size of 2 golfballs and by spraying the one little 6 inch tall cane that was left, with water to hydrate, and then placing a plastic bag, large enough to not touch the cane, over the canopy, to treat it as one would a newly rooted rose in a greenhouse. After only 3 weeks it started growing new leaves and in 3 months was thriving. Darn critters, I love them but they can be bad neighbors to roses.

Lux.