Stoney Flower Bed & Mole Ravaged Lawn
TheWelshOne
Posts: 1
Hello all.
I bought a new house last July, perfect house for my family, unfortunately the garden and and a few others in the street had a little friend, cute little mole, he would spend a few days in our garden and would move onto our neighbors garden. As you can see he has completely ravaged the lawn. Haven't seen him for a few months but I'm putting this down to cold weather and not being able to dig through the frozen soil. Any ideas what I can do to improve this?
Also, I am planning to put some flowers in our flower bed, the soil is very stoney and no matter how far down i dig or how much I rake the soil there's still lots of stones in the soil.
My plan is to put down some membrane and plant some flowers suitable for such soil, finish off with stone on the bed.
The garden is southerly facing and gets plenty of sun in the spring/summer not so much in the autumn/winter when the sun is low.
Please take a look at the pics.
Many Thanks.
TheWelshOne
Posts
Moles always have a burst of activity early in the year, it's the first sign that spring is coming round here
They usually settle down a bit later. Not much you can do when it won't be in your garden for long, having the run of everyone else's too.
There is one thing you could try though. Gardening Which ? did a trial of mole deterrents and found none of them worked, except as they said: "Bizarrely, putting pickled onions in the runs did seem to encourage them to re-locate".
Stones in the soil of a flower bed aren't really a problem, providing there's enough soil for the plants to get their roots into. You can still have fertile soil even if it's stony. I'd research the particular plants you want to grow and then decide if you need to add compost, chicken manure etc to help them to grow well. Certainly, annual flowers often produce more flowers in less fertile soil...
The stones may well work to the surface of your lawn, though. It's irritating but you may need to go on "stone patrol" before you cut the grass.
You said it was a New build, I found so many bricks and huge pebbles in my garden as a new build that I recycled them into a brick BBQ. Over the years I have cleared many buckets of stones, its something we all have to deal with. Can you hire a Mole catcher to catch them and relocate them? Also I think you can drop smoke canisters down the holes and send them spluttering off to someone elses garden...
Last edited: 12 February 2018 00:18:10