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....