The Summerland Advocate-Messenger - Reliable, Trustworthy Reporting, Capturing The Heartbeat Of Our Community

I am an enthusiastic gardener. My goal was to have a serenity garden- a place where I could go after work to fill up my senses and calm and refresh my spirit. This is what I had for a long time, and then came The Gophers...a plague of gophers.

The awful thing about gophers is how they destroy with no apparent purpose. Unlike rabbits, who eat lettuce because they are hungry, gophers seem to take joy in destruction.

I asked local gardeners what to do: "Put mothballs down the hole.” Okay. The next day there was a neat little pile of rejected mothballs at the mouth of the hole. "Use vinegar."That didn't work. "Put a hose down the hole and flood them out. "I stuck a hose in the hole and pushed it further in and further in ... the gopher run was longer than my hose! Someone suggested gas bombs, poison pellets, traps, but here was where I drew the line - I had dogs at the time, and I did not want them to eat a poisoned gopher nor be hurt by a trap.

I no longer looked forward to going into the garden. It was in a state of siege. What fresh hell awaited me there.

The tipping point came early one morning. I was still in my pajamas, I was raging and stomping on a newly-dug gopher mound on what used to be pepper plants, wildly swinging an empty bottle of Tabasco sauce that I had just poured down the gopher hole...and then I stopped.....I was consumed by Gopher Rage! What was I thinking! This was futile. The gophers had just as much right to be here as I did. There had to be a better way.

The next year, I planted a container garden. I know this sounds silly to have an urban garden in the country, but the gophers have left it alone. My serenity garden has been restored.