Are you in gopher territory? Those are pretty big hills.

Those are typical mole hills Ron. They are as large as some of mine.

One time when my brother was visiting from Idaho, he asked me why I dumped my wheelbarrow full of dirt in the middle of the lawn. Mole hills, Tim, mole hills.

My neighbor began trapping them 40 years ago on his ten acres and started out getting an average of two a week with five traps. He's still getting two a week. They are territorial and come out of the woods as soon as there's a vacancy. He has a very nice looking landscape, .......except for the five gallon white buckets he has covering the traps.

I have them also, but they're only a problem in the lawn. Not just the hills, but it's the sunken tunnels that's more work to fix. My solution was to get rid of most of the lawn. I'm down to less than 500 sq. ft. now. Where I once had lawn I now have wood chip paths and larger beds. Not a solution for everybody, but it works for me.

Mike

I've seen lots of mole hills.

Gopher hills/mounds tend to be one sided; mole hills are a more uniform 'volcano' surrounding the tunnel hole.

Really the only way to get rid of moles is trapping - all those home remedies you see advertised or for sale - the so-called 'mole plant', chewing gum, castor oil, flooding tunnels, sonic noise generators, etc. - have little to no effect. A good hunting cat can work pretty well, though!

The good thing is that moles generally indicate you have a healthy, biologically active soil. And they do tend to be most disruptive to lawns but they really are performing valuable aerating services! Just smoosh the soil back into the hole and tamp it down well. And you can follow the tunnels from hill to hill and do the same. Once the current population of grubs, worms and other soil larvae are depleted, the moles will move on. At least temporarily :-))

Trapping has worked for me. It's a pain in the rear, but eventually I get them.

I'm going to try a heavy dose of fertilizer on the lawn in the Spring and see if that works. So heavy the worms won't like it. Just short of burning the grass.

Over the years people have given me bags of fertilizer for one reason or another. I normally don't use it. Maybe this will work.

Mike

Thanks everyone for the comments. If our cat wasn't so fat and lazy maybe she would hunt the moles! As it is, guess I'll continue with the same, smoothing the mounds and trying to ignore the frustrations and complaints from my sweetie.

It's more than a pain in the rear for the moles.

Mike, you think you have cranefly maggots in your lawn. Even with glysophate and woodchips in your brush beds I bet you still have plenty of earth worms in them.

I like your pictures. Is the elk and deer damage in your garden? I'm glad I only have deer damage in mine! This fall not only did the two point buck damage some Schefflera, Metapanax delavayi, pushed over and ripped off fronds of some of my palm trees, but scraped the bark off a western hemlock and a nice tall vine maple. My game camera caught him during the time that this old man was in bed sleeping. LOL

When my lawn was Kentucky Blue Grass I had a lot of Crane Fly larvae,
now not so much. One time years ago I put down a poison to kill the
larvae. They all came to the surface and the eight mallards my wife had
been feeding, ate them and started acting funny. It took a week for them
to jerk to a stop and die. I haven't used poison on any bug or animal
since. Feeding the ducks cracked corn did the pond no good either. The
ducks never left the pond and turned it into a mud hole. Live and learn.

The
deer and elk do mostly cosmetic damage, but can, and have, broken small
trees in half. I have an old picture taken by my game cam of a elk cow
in the driveway. It seems like whenever I see one I'm not carrying my
camera. :-(

She looks well fed.

She is a nice looking elk, and by the way she is looking at the camera she knows it! LOL

Interesting that it was in that close to Seattle.

Ok, a little departure from moles. This is what surrounded our yard the other day. Bigger than moles!!!!

That many can do a real trim job on your garden!

Is that a Sitka spruce with the ivy on it?

There's a herd just east of me near Maple Valley and another one in the Cedar River watershed where Seattle gets about half of it's water. I'm glad I'm just dealing with a few......for now.

Getting rid of your lawn might work for moles, but it would do nothing to deter gophers. And THEY eat your plants, being vegetarians. They will eat any and all roses, apple trees, Japanese maples (but seem to leave the Big Leaf native maple alone on our place where they are a weed. And that's just a few of the things they eat. We trap, but rarely catch a gopher--more usually moles. Our barn cats get voles, baby moles, mice and (sigh) the occasional bird, but never a gopher.

Yes, Mike, Sitka spruce on the lot across the road from our home. The photos were taken from inside our house. Fortunately, the elk didn't wander up in my yard. I had to tell them that it was time to move on.

Juliotoole, thanks for the reply. I would love to remove all the lawn but it just wouldn't correspond to the layout of our landscape. I reckon, trapping is the best method.

They do not like male urine. I know it's gross, but I had my lil sons discretely pee in the holes and tunnels and around the property line for years. Helped. They grew up, moles must have seen the uhaul. I fight them again now;

I keep telling my sister that she should hire out her dog! Berry, a Basenji/Shepherd mix, walks around the yard listening for moles and catches 10-15 every summer. My Great Pyrenees barks at the mole hills, so I know she hears them, but she's too busy running off the varmints she can see to go after subterranean ones.