Hello!

Welcome to the web log of the Environmental Horticulture (EH) Department at Santa Barbara City College. This is a new site, and my first posting of a blog ever. Even though I’m a novice at blogging, I hope to make this an informal, entertaining forum for telling you about current activities in our department, and how to creatively learn and grow as a plant-lover and plant-professional.  Like any profession or hobby, the real learning comes when you get down to the nitty-gritty, wade through the slough of opinions, advice and facts and figure out, on your own, how to proceed. 

Horticulture is no different . . .  we are dealing with living things, folks, and there is much grey area regarding their care.  Instead of being a blog outlining the exact steps for gardening or landscaping, I want to share our successes and mistakes and insodoing help you know how to approach and solve problems yourself. Plant care is complex and to some degree a mystery, and in that mystery lies the fun, inspiration and excitement of it, at least I think. If I knew everything about horticulture I’d be bored stiff, or at least highly inflexible. And the good new is, that we are dealing with plants (not people or animal care) so if you make a big mistake, its ok, you can start over, buy new plants and compost the ones that didn’t make it.

So, read on for an idea of what the blog will be like, with different topics each time. And remember to check out the EH website that outlines our many courses in sustainable landscaping and horticulture, and our degree options. There are some good things happening around our department and new sustainable landscape displays in our gardens. I hope you can learn from them and get hooked on plants, like all of us!

Gopher Control:

Let’s delve right in. I started this job two years ago, and the most frequent question I get is this:  How do you get rid of gophers?  Like I said, there are a cornucopia of methods, approaches, philosophies and rates of success regarding gopher control (although if I really only wanted to ‘control’ gophers, I’d tell them to clean up their tunnels, brush their grimy, green little teeth, and try to make them feel guilty for killing plants). We’re really talking gopher eradication. Here are some of our experiences in gopher eradication in our on-campus garden, the Lifescape Garden.

One of my students brought in a contraption that consisted of a flexible black rubber tube, about 2” in diameter that tapered down to a garden hose-size tube with a male-end that could attach to a garden hose. He explained that you put the large end over the tail-pipe of your car, attach the garden hose to the other end and stick the garden hose into the gopher tunnel. Then turn on the ignition . . . and let the carbon monoxide do its number on the gophers. Did we try this at home, or on-campus . . . no. He swore it was effective but it’s pretty toxic for the soil organisms, not to mention decreasing my chances for any kind of carbon neutral day.  And then there’s always filling tunnels with propane gas and igniting it to cause small explosions that annihilate all life in the tunnels. Sounds kind of fun in a twisted, Caddy-Shack sort of way, but too intrusive for our campus garden and our eco-sensibilities, and definitely inappropriate for most residential yards (A local retreat center uses this method and has had the sheriff come by, thinking that guns were being fired!).

We have focused on non-toxic methods by setting traps. The McAbee trap, the classic gopher trap that’s been around for a long time, works well. Yet, you have to know the tricks to really have this method be effective in gopher eradication.  For example, baiting the trap with something like fennel, or mallow, using gloves so your human scent isn’t on the trap or in the tunnel, and setting them in one of the main tunnels, not the side tunnels. When we’ve done all these things, about 1 out of every 4 traps catches (kills) a gopher. We also have experimented with chewed and un-chewed juicy fruit gum with little success. The idea is that the gophers ingest the gum and then choke.

Our best successes are coming from a new type of trap called the ‘Gophinator’ that is similar in operation to the McAbee but works about 2-3x as well (available locally at All Around Landscape Supply). They are faster, stronger and also more humane because they kill the gopher much more efficiently. The McAbee tends to leave a good portion of the gophers just injured, and struggling for a long time. No fun for them or us when we have to do the dirty deed of finishing off what the trap should have done.

Of course we also use chicken wire cages around really special plants and planters, and this works fairly well too. Although a friend just told me that his gophers went above ground to get inside the cages and eat away the plant roots . . . so nothing’s fool-proof.

A good female, hunting cat might be worth your time too!

Good luck and if you’ve any questions on anything related to plants or anecdotal stories to share regarding gopher control, send them on to me ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ). Until next time . . . Mike