Garden: Voles & Destruction

Our soil is heavy clay, but slowly becoming a lovely rich dark substance thanks to the massive quantities of horse manure and home-made compost we've added to the uninspiring sticky blue and yellow subsoil with which we started. My mantra is never walk on the ground; clay soils can suffer with compaction making drainage a problem and increasing the workload for the soil fauna and roots trying to make their way through the ground. To help with this, the beds were constructed a metre and a half across and six metres long with half metre grass paths running between them. I reckoned the width was narrow enough for me to reach to the middle without stepping on the surface, which it was until rheumatoid disease came along and made my body weak painful and inflexible, and the length was short enough to stop me just hopping across rather than walking around. I have a large square of plywood for when I must stand in the middle for planting or whatever, to spread my weight.

And all has worked well for seven years; the beds are starting to mound up above the surrounding paths as more and more material is added. The grass paths and the clippings from cutting it are far more attractive to the zillions of slugs than the plants themselves, once they are beyond the seedling stage, at least.

The only glitch has been the boom in the worm population inevitably bringing in a mole. From time to time a cat will catch one, or I'll get one in the trap, the latter being rather more humane than the kitty method, as we can then relocate the mole to a far distant field. Although within days of the vacancy arising a new resident will arrive as evidenced by a frenzy of home improvements.

Mole - smaller than I thought.

I tolerate the mole, while not making life easy for them, regularly digging out the runs - they favour going up and down the edges of the beds, presumably between the light soil of the plot and the solid never-disturbed clay supporting the paths. And while I do have to return plants to the ground from time to time, and it is frustrating to watch my water or homemade feed run straight out of the bed at the bottom through the network of drains the animal has thoughtfully dug into my plot (we are on a slope), I mostly put up with the moles.
But now the voles arrived. Over the years I've lost a few leeks and tulip bulbs (always when in bloom) and have long since given up the idea of having a sweep of daffodils along the 50m drive, but this year the pests are here in huge numbers. In the space of a week I lost three quarters of my cucumber plants, the leeks I was leaving to flower in order to save the seed and half a dozen aubergines, all being eaten from below. 

The neat round hole and empty space where a cucumber plant has been eaten.

I can clearly see the tunnels the voles have made across the veg beds; they run just beneath the surface, creating a distinctive rise in the soil which inevitably tracks from one plant to the next. The voles are also using the mole runs themselves as I've caught a couple in the deeply buried mole trap.
So this spring I've changed my strategy and as a result have changed my entire approach to the no walk practice. Instead of digging out the mole runs along the sides of the paths, I've stamped them down, broken the tunnels and compacted the soil so it is harder for the voles to tunnel through it. I don't grow right to the edge anyway because I would have been planting into a mole tunnel, or sowing directly above one and the plants would not have flourished. Where I see the passages over the surface and where it is obvious plants are being disturbed I've thrown the no-walk right out of the window and now do a grumpy dance on the surface. Short cut across the bed? No problem.

Felled earlibird sweetcorn. You can see the track running from the left of the plant at the bottom of the photo.

If this becomes an ongoing or long term issue, I may consider removing the grass paths, although then the slugs may become  more serious pest again! Watch this space for how the great vole battle unfolds.