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market-farming - Re: [Market-farming] Vole Salad Bar

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  • From: Owsley lucy <boulderbelt AT embarqmail.com>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] Vole Salad Bar
  • Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2010 07:33:11 -0500

I have not read all the posts in this topic so excuse me if this has been suggested.

5 gallon bucket with at least 4" of water in it. Put some bait at the top of the bucket and an easy way to get into the bucket. The rodents climb into the bucket and drop into the water and drown. We also have lots of small boxes (around 12" x 12" x 3") with 2 small holes and two regular mouse traps per box. The boxes are attractive to the rodents and they enter and get killed. We have found these boxes to be around 5x more effective than traps alone. We also use cats and dogs to catch some. In the seed starting room we had a bad problem the first year we were on this farm and used a combination of cats, sticky traps, mouse traps and a couple of failed ideas to keep the mice from eating all the seedlings (and that year they did destroy several hundred pepper seedlings as well as several flats of lettuce before we killed the critters living in that room). Once we had all the mice killed in the seedling room we have had no more problems in 4 years.

Now the hoop houses are a whole 'nother matter. No matter what we do we have too many voles in them. The box traps do help a lot but we still lose seedlings and seeds. We have found that taking old drip tape and slitting it lengthwise and than covering the seedlings (think cutworm collar only you want to cover pretty much the entire plant)  works well at keeping the voles from eating them. in the past we have always had 2 to 3 good mousing cats. Currently we have one poor mousing cat and the population has grown. Hopefully we will get some kitties and get them trained to do some work around here by summer.

Like others we will not use poisons to control the vermin.


Lucy Goodman
Boulder Belt Eco-Farm
Eaton, OH







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