Hi,

For the first time last year, my wife's flower garden had some sort of
underground pest eat about 30 lilly bulbs from the ground up. We are in
upstate NY, if that matters. There were little tunnels to each plant, and
the roots were just...gone. You could touch the plant and it would just
fall over. At first I thought it was moles, but then read that they don't
eat roots. I live in a wooded area, and see chipmunks running all over --
could they be doing this? My other thought was voles or shrews, both of
which I see once in a while. The tunnels are too small to be gophers.

My first question I guess is, what is doing it. My second question is how
do I stop it. I have started making wire baskets out of hardware cloth,
but that is very timeconsuming and I'm not sure how long they'd last buried
in the ground. I have also read that most of the repellents are only
temporary, and that the sonic posts don't work at all. I'm sure this
question has been answered a million times, but I couldn't come up with any
search terms for google that would tell me what could be eating the root
systems out from under the plants. Thanks for any info you can provide...

On 5/19/07 5:32 PM, in article ,
"brock" wrote:

Hi,

For the first time last year, my wife's flower garden had some sort of
underground pest eat about 30 lilly bulbs from the ground up. We are in
upstate NY, if that matters. There were little tunnels to each plant, and
the roots were just...gone. You could touch the plant and it would just
fall over. At first I thought it was moles, but then read that they don't
eat roots. I live in a wooded area, and see chipmunks running all over --
could they be doing this? My other thought was voles or shrews, both of
which I see once in a while. The tunnels are too small to be gophers.

My first question I guess is, what is doing it. My second question is how
do I stop it. I have started making wire baskets out of hardware cloth,
but that is very timeconsuming and I'm not sure how long they'd last buried
in the ground. I have also read that most of the repellents are only
temporary, and that the sonic posts don't work at all. I'm sure this
question has been answered a million times, but I couldn't come up with any
search terms for google that would tell me what could be eating the root
systems out from under the plants. Thanks for any info you can provide...
I'd bet the problem is voles. Research from that angle and good luck