Did you know that pound-for-pound the common garden mole is more efficient than the 642-ton Emerald Mole tunneling machine? While the Emerald Mole achieves 5 feet per hour on a good day, the little critter can dig 15 feet per hour in good soils. What most gardeners will be interested in is not how quickly moles can dig, but how to prevent the appearance of molehills in their lawns.
“When moles are most active, about 20 percent of the calls agent Dave Pehling takes at the Washington State University extension office in Everett, Wash., are from people exasperated by moles.
“There’s not really a lot we can tell them,” Pehling said. That’s because nothing really works for long to get rid of a mole, and if it does, another will just move in”.
But if you can contain your irritation, there is a plus side.
“People should be grateful for moles, agrees Linda Chalker-Scott, associate professor and extension urban horticulturist at Puyallup for Washington State University.
“They are definitely your friends. They are nature’s little rototillers; they aerate the soil and do a wonderful job of bringing a lot of organic material into the soil. They are doing all this great work for us, we don’t have to pay them anything, and most of us are out there trying to kill them.” Read more..
And the soil from those molehills can be converted into excellent potting compost. Read more..
Slugs are another common problem for many of us. The way that they nibble at our emerging plants I find particularly annoying. Suggested remedies are many and varied. My bookshelf contains a slim volume entitled “50 Ways To Kill A Slug” which lists all the conventional forms of control plus several weired ideas. Kym Pokorny writing in The Oregonian has her own suggestions. Read more..
The fact that there are so many different ways to make compost tends to make the process seem more complicated than it really is. Here’s a suggestion for making compost indoors using some rather unusual ingredients:
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