Hi Sammy,

My best guess would be moles or gophers, and I have trouble telling the mounds apart because they just look too much alike to me.

Here's a webpage from The Gopher Guy that shows the difference between mole mounds and gopher mounds (but even after studying those photos I still have trouble telling one from the other).

Moles Vs. Gophers

If you have moles, they eat grubs and insects, so wouldn't hurt your yard or garden except that the mounds might be unsightly, or they might disturb some plant roots while tunneling past them.

If you have gophers, they could be a problem. The best solution is trapping them.

Don't you have voles there too? Isn't that why you plant your roses in hardware cloth cages beneath the surface of the soil? Our voles make small mounds, but normally not large ones.

One thing that can be helpful is to gently scrape away the mound of soil to look at the hole in the ground beneath it. Often the size of the hole can provide a good clue to what you're dealing with. Here's a webpage that shows and describes the various sizes of ground holes.

Ground Holes

When we have large mounds here after heavy rainfall, they often are fire ants. I do not know if fire ants have made their way that far north yet, but if they have, they could be fire ant mounds. Gently poke at a mound with a stick and stir the soil just a bit. If fire ants come swarming out of it, there's your answer.

Please keep us posted on what you figure out.

Dawn

By far the easiest and most effective trap is the box trap that can be found at a lot of feed stores. It is a wooden box, missing a bottom and front. Set the trap every evening and within a week you will have it figured out. Shovel out around the dirt pile till you find an empty tunnel.

Thank you Dawn and Scott. I also feel confused after having read about the pests. The one thing that I understand is the dirt clods. I think we have dirt clods which would mean moles. Dawn, you have a good memory. We did use hardware cloth cages for years, but recently we have had to dig down, and snip away some of the cages because I felt that they were damaging some of the larger roots. I want "easy" now, and had stopped with the cages. They are a pain to use, but I don't know of anything else.

Hi Scott! Good to see you here. I wasn't sure if the box traps still are available, so I'm glad to hear they still are in stores up there.

Sammy, I had wondered if your roses every would reach the point that the cages might be a problem. Now I know the answer.

For what it is worth, I don't know what else you could use to protect the roses either. Voles are a hard problem to combat, especially if they just keep coming from your nearby creek area. We can trap all day long, but with more voles coming out of the woods constantly, it gets old and it never, ever ends.

Dawn

I gave up on moles long ago. Sometimes mole piles look like gopher piles, but gopher piles rarely look like mole piles. Meaning, if you are not sure, then 80% of the time it is moles. Like you guys mentioned, gophers are always fine dirt with no clods unless they have been rained on. Moles push dirt up, gophers push dirt up and over.

If I was a decent poster, I would take some pictures this weekend of the two in my yard.