Thanks everyone, appreciate the comments. I'd really rather not kill or trap them, just not sure how bad it'll get if I leave them alone.
We have a lot of moles around here. I put large empty plastic water bottles onto bamboo canes and "plant" them around the garden. Moles hate noise and vibration so the bottles rattling seems to deter them. I rarely find any mole hills in the garden since using this technique. Cheap, bottles easily replaced when a hole is eventually worn into them.
I used to have a "cunning plan", kill the worms and the moles leave. It worked well, but is not for 2023.
There are two types of mole damage: Summer surface runs, and winter molehills. I tolerate both in the borders and woods. But for the lawn, I usually recompress the soil with my heels and top up with fresh soil. Infrequently, I will seed a bit. With constant attention it seems to suit my garden. Any plants disturbed in the border just need a wee bit of firming and watering.
location: Surrey Hills, England, ex-woodland acidic sand. "Have nothing in your garden that you don't know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."
Where we lived in Staffordshire we had Moles, so I went to the Hardware store and they sold me these rocket looking things with batteries in them, stuck in the ground near the runs, they either pushed them up or just went round them. We had a busy road nearby that had heavy goods lorries going by, if the vibration from those didn't scare them away a flippin' 9 volt battery wasn't going to do much. I left them in the garage when I sold the house, thought new owner might want to try them...................I didn't go down the "Carrot" method I'd have lost my firearms licence.
When we moved to our present house, I brought a lot of rooted hedge cuttings and duly planted them along the back garden boundary. One by one they started to keel over and I discovered we had a mole that was travelling through the newly dug and watered earth. The hedge plants also had to contend with squirrels pulling them out and eating the base so I made wire cages for the plants and fixed them to the eath with long wire loops. Slowly the mole moved from one end of the garden to the other and eventually disappeared but whether this was due to the search for pastures new, the long metal spikes holding the cages in place, or the large plastic daisy spinners (for noise and vibration) I had stuck in the garden, I know not. The plastic daisies stayed in situ for years just in case the mole returned but it never did.
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There are two types of mole damage: Summer surface runs, and winter molehills. I tolerate both in the borders and woods. But for the lawn, I usually recompress the soil with my heels and top up with fresh soil. Infrequently, I will seed a bit. With constant attention it seems to suit my garden. Any plants disturbed in the border just need a wee bit of firming and watering.
"Have nothing in your garden that you don't know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."
When you don't even know who's in the team
S.Yorkshire/Derbyshire border
Molesketch - Unrecorded Jasper Carrott - YouTube