Ginkgo

Last week the weather was rather hot and the ginkgo in the berm was looking a little droopy. I don't water there much and the tree had been in that spot for three years - it was one of the first things I planted when we moved into this house. I cut up a little circle of lawn and put in the ginkgo seedling I grew from seed I harvested from a tree in our previous neighborhood. The tree thrived and grew to a height of 8 ft over the few years.
I gave the tree a nice, deep watering and went on with my life. Last night I looked out the kitchen window to see the ginkgo tilting at an angle. When I pulled it out there were no roots and just a chewed lower trunk left.

gopher damage to ginkgo

I wondered why the gophers left the tree for three years and I also wondered why hollyhocks still stood in the berm, when in years past those hollyhocks would have been long gone.
I am now accustomed to the loss of plants to gophers, and I do feel sad about the loss of this tree. It is somehow different to grow a nice tree than to buy a nice tree. I felt a certain pride in the tree. I was also excited at growing a seedling ginkgo, which creates diversity in the gene pool, unlike grafted male trees.

Ginkgo

The tree will not go to waste, the leafy branches will become mulch for the persimmon tree in the back yard and the trunk will perhaps become a bean pole or a stake for something or other. Perhaps I could fashion it into a spear with the special power to pierce the earth and get a gopher every time.

Back to the garden

The hummingbird has been taking up lots of space so I thought I'd best get back to the garden for a bit. This spring has been terrible for gophers. They've been going after the usual favorites (theirs and mine) like leeks, garlic, onions and potatoes. They've expanded their diet by also eating a couple of abutilons (common name is flowering maple but they are not maples), they decided this was the year to eat up the campanula, and interestingly they've been eating tomato plants, which I had understood they would not eat. I have lost several tomato plants to the rodents and, while I've been toughening myself to the losses over the past few years, I find the tomato losses a bit hard to take.

When I look at the front yard and see the lovely, large hollyhocks in bloom, I know it is only a matter of time before the gophers will chew the large roots up until the things fall over. I'm enjoying the flowers while they are here. Life in the garden is transitory anyway. In a side note, Hollyhock flowers are frequented by hummingbirds.

The gopher situation in the back yard (where the tomatoes are) is the most bothersome. I set traps, and so far I haven't had near the success in trapping as I've had before. Though I did manage to snag one in a trap I set last night, which buoyed my hopes of at least getting the leeks to go to seed, so I can disperse them to a wider area. Leek blossoms are also rather beautiful, in my opinion. I suppose I would rather lose leeks than my fruit trees. And I am unwilling to sink hardware cloth into the soil, so losses must be accepted.

From the Melon patch

I found a promising discovery on a melon plant (Delice de Table).
A nice melon forming under the canopy of leaves. I grew this variety because I liked the Seed Savers Exchange description:

French heirloom listed by Vilmorin in 1885. Translates as “Delight of the Table.” Ribbed fruits have sweet orange flesh and weigh about 1-2 pounds. Very hard-to-find, almost extinct. 85-90 days.


Also under the canopy of leaves, and about a half-gopher length away from the forming melon was a gopher hole.

Seems that gophers like to feed on the fruits of melons. Much to my dismay, another loss to those underground pests.


My permaculture training suggests I don't have too many gophers but too few enemies of gophers. Should I import gopher-snakes to reduce the population? The local cats are not doing their part, and birds of prey have little chance with all the cover my garden offers to gophers.

Too many heartaches from gophers eating my garlic, onions, potatoes, hollyhocks, and pea plants (to name only a few), led me to trapping.

I have kept count of the gophers I trapped. Nineteen gophers in as many months is what I consider an infestation. I still have a few gophers working the garden, but 19 is ridiculous.

In any garden some crop loss is expected—to birds or bugs—but last year gophers took more of my garlic crop than I got and they would have taken it all if I hadn't dug it up. They destroyed an entire fig tree by eating its roots all the way to the trunk, until the tree just wilted and flopped over. They have eaten the roots of mature hollyhocks, have eaten many plants worth of potato tubers, and taken down mature leeks just at their peak.

I observe their activity, and will trap when I take too many plant losses in an area. This melon still needed weeks on the vine to ripen, and it takes such a long time to even get fruit on some melon plants. In times like this it is difficult to not get discouraged.

Eliot Coleman, in his latest book The Winter Harvest Handbook, writes about a crop-devestating problem he had with meadow voles, and how the only solution he found was trapping.

Eliot Coleman writes "Although I am a mild-mannered sort and show great kindness and respect to wild creatures in general, I admit to a strong aversion to voles in the winter greenhouse."
"I know from my records that one year I trapped over fifty voles in the vicinity of the greenhouses during August and September, and a neighbor's cat probably got almost that many. Come winter it didn't seem as if we had even made a dent."

Knowing that Eliot Coleman, the organic gardening and farming guru of our time, traps meadow voles made me feel less monstrous in my own trapping efforts.

I hope I am able to grow some of these melons to maturity so that I might taste such an old variety and also that I might participate in saving and sharing the seeds of an amost extinct food.