Mole Hill Manor

I spent last spring/summer/fall working on our front yard (and taking care of a newborn in my spare time). Now that the front is at least up to neighborhood standards, we decided to spend this summer working on the back. Unfortunately, this has meant renovating, painting and staining our deck, but at least we can now sit and eat our dinner outside and the first topic of dinnertime conversation is NOT how much we hate the deck.

This project took much longer than anticipated, as the husband-in-charge-of carpentry was often away on business, while I was only able to work on the painting and staining in 2-hour shifts during the kidlet's naps. But finally, finally the deck is completed and now I have been trying to motivate myself to continue working on the yard. It's not much fun to sit out on your newly improved deck when all you have to stare at is a bunch of weeds and overgrown shrubs (though a margarita does elevate the fun-factor a bit).

Our backyard borders a common area that is called a "greenspace". Several weeks ago, we noticed some very suspicious-looking mounds of dirt starting to crop up in the greenspace. Every couple of days, a new mound would show up, inching closer to our yard like some kind of infectious rash. We knew it was only a matter of time before Mr. Mole decided to begin excavation in our yard.

Just as I was starting to feel slightly enthusiastic about working on the yard, 3 molehills showed up. For some reason, I find these molehills very embarrassing. It's like our yard has developed the plague or something, and I'm afraid the neighbors will begin to shun us. So I went to Home Depot and perused the "Pest & Pesticide" aisle to see what our options were:

Option 1: Mole deterrent. Supposedly, you sprinkle this smelly stuff all over your yard and then flood it with water so it saturates the dirt. The mole doesn't like digging in the smelly dirt and goes somewhere else (like your neighbor's yard. See! Moles ARE infectious!) Since this is an area where I will have to be digging and working in the yard myself, saturating the dirt with smelly chemicals just didn't seem the way to go.

Option2: Poisonous gas. This one was interesting. You light a short fuse at end of this thing that looks like an M-80 firecracker and shove it down the mole hole. It emits a sulfur-based "highly toxic" gas that supposedly goes throughout the tunnel system and kills the mole. The box had this huge CAUTION label on the back, however, that said something about avoiding inhalation of the gas, and if the gas was inhaled, the victim should be moved to fresh air immediately, preferably provided with supplemental oxygen, and if respirations stopped, rescue breathing should be performed. I got this mental image of the medical examiner shaking his head while standing over my gassed, lifeless body lying next to the mole holes and put the box back on the shelf.

Option 3: Traps. There were several varieties of traps that you shove down the mole hole in a strategic manner so that the varmit ends up impaled on a skewer-like device (kind of like a redneck shish-kebob). Now, the advantage is that you KNOW you've caught the critter. Of course the disadvantage is DISPOSING of said critter.

So, with these options in mind, I did what any girl with high-speed internet access would do and Googled "Mole Control". Unfortunately, it is the majority opinion of the internet "experts" that traps are truly the only way to get rid of them. I did, however, find a very interesting article on why the "Juicy-Fruit Gum Method" lauded by multiple old wives cannot possibly work, as well as multiple factoids about moles in general. How did I function before the internet?

The moles in my yard had better consider themselves warned.