Prairie Lawn Critters and Pests

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There's a variety of murderous mole traps you can set, and you can also fill the tunnels with water or vehicle exhaust. It is more humane, however, to repel rather than murder moles. The most benign repellent is sound. Wind-powered lawn ornaments send a clacking sound into the ground that is reputed to drive moles away. You can find the finished device or plans to make one yourself advertised in woodcraft and garden supply magazines and catalogs.

An old-fashioned yet effective anti-mole measure is to plant castor beans around the margins of your lawn. Especially if started indoors in late winter, a row of castor can grow into an effective screen hedge. The entire plant is mildly toxic and has been proven in both common practice and scientific tests to repel moles. However, after making sprays of vivid red, spikey flowers, the plant produces large, brown, lima-shaped beans that are highly toxic to small children, pets and livestock. The seed pulp contains castor oil, a purgative, plus a toxin called ricin that is so poisonous it has been used as an organic pest control and is suspected as an agent of biological warfare. It is best not to grow castor anywhere children or domestic animals can get to it. And, to prevent grief, never let the plants make seed; nip off the large flowering spikes as soon as they appear.

You can buy liquid mole repellent made from castor oil (which cannot mix with water-based ricin, so the repellent contains none of the poison) in hardware and garden supply outlets or on the Internet: elixir of castor bean in spray-on-the-lawn concentrate is available from www.deerbusters.com .

Or, you can make your own castor-oil concentrate by mixing six ounces of castor oil (from any drugstore) and two tablespoons of detergent with one gallon of water. Apply it to your lawn using a hose spray-mixer, combine at a rate of one cup castor oil concentrate to one gallon of water. Water lawn thoroughly so the mix gets down to mole level - about six inches below ground.

The only foolproof, nontoxic gopher repellents we know of are onions, garlic, dahlias and other bulbs, tubers and succulent-rooted plants. Grow them inside loosely closed cylinders rolled from 1' x 4' rectangles of 1/2"-grid galvanized fence-wire. This method makes harvesting easy; once top-growth has died down, just dig them up and shake soil from inside the cages, crop and all. You can hang the roots, still inside cages, from barn rafters to dry. Unhook and open cages to remove and clean roots for winter storage. Open cages will retain their curve and store stacked in threes and fours out of the way, hanging on hooks or big nails tapped into the barn wall.

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