I have written about groundhogs several times over the past years. I have battled these voracious eaters for many years. They have become the most common pests in urban gardens.
We don’t have many deer because we have so many fences. Raccoons eat my compost but leave the garden pretty much alone, and rabbits and chipmunks don’t compete well with the neighbors’ cats.
Since I live in the city, firearms are out of the question. I trapped for a number of years but that got expensive.
I am a volunteer naturalist and should have realized this sooner, but groundhogs are territorial and every year they have a new crop of young pups that start to disperse about now. That is significant because no matter how you remove them, another will come to take its place. This makes our sad efforts at removing them pointless and frustrating.
Last year, because of some health issues, I got an elevated raised bed. It’s easy on the back and an additional benefits is that my groundhogs have to work too hard to get into it. A friend pointed out that groundhogs are basically lazy; they will eat the easy stuff.
This year I added two more. I have had lettuce, peas, herbs, and such that I have not been able to grow for a long time. In addition, the pepper plants that I put in the bed have done far better than the ones in the ground — this may be groundhog caused, I’m not sure. These beds have metal legs which make access difficult. I suspect if it were easy to climb up, they would get into them.
The only problem with the raised beds is growing tomatoes, a major reason I garden. They are too big and have much too strong a root system unless they are bred for pots, and those varieties are not usually very good.
A proper groundhog exclusion fence is an engineering marvel. You need fine gauge woven wire, buried underground, and turned out at least a foot to prevent the groundhog from digging under the fence. After all of that, it I recommended that you run at least one strand of electric fence close to ground level. Pretty daunting.
My still experimental but promising tactic is to use electric fence posts (Fi-Shock Step-In), some inexpensive temporary garden fencing and a lot of ingenuity. It’s a good start. It took the groundhog a couple of weeks to figure out it could slip under the fencing. I got a few tomatoes in that time, yum.
I then remembered my landscaping staples left over from another brilliant idea. Pinning the fencing down has kept the groundhog from just slipping under it. The plastic fencing is much too flexible for the groundhog to crawl over it, and so far I still have green tomatoes.
I have another experiment going with my flower and shrub beds, but that’s another article. Summer isn’t over, but I have enjoyed many salads and my fresh herbs are really nice.
For more information on groundhogs, visit http://go.osu.edu/groundhogs.
Scudier is an Ohio State University Mahoning County Extension Master Gardener Volunteer.
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I have written about groundhogs several times over the past years. I have battled these voracious eaters for many ...
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