Mice and Voles

Small, burrowing rodents like mice and voles love the winter garden. Mice are a particular scourge in early fall when I'm trying to encourage spinach seedlings to grow.

Under the cover supplied by the chicken wire that keeps squirrels from digging up seedlings, mice will feast on these same seedlings. Mice will eat them right down to the dirt. A healthy stand of spinach seedlings in the evening will be nothing by a bare patch of dirt the next morning, and the chicken wire covering the garden will insure the rodents' safety from ferrel cats and owls as they mow down the seedlings.

Later in the year, in the depth of winter, when glass and insulating blankets create an artificially warm environment inside the winter cold frame, voles will find an ideal nesting environment, once again, protected from ferrel cats by the glass covering. They'll burrow right in and set up housekeeping.

What to do . . .

I recommend traps: live traps or spring-loaded mouse traps. I don't even bait the traps. Rodents favor walls when they move about. If you position traps inside the cold frame next to an outside wall, especially in a corner, you'll trap mice and voles before they have time to do too much damage (or maybe after they've done a great deal of damage). I recommend keeping loaded traps in the cold frame as long as you have small plants, and that will take you through February. When I start seeing damage, I bait the traps and hope I can wipe them out before they wipe out the garden.

Still, it may not be enough. Mice and voles are so numerous in the natural environment that you may lose an entire crop. I had that happen once. I lost an entire crop of winter spinach to mice. It was a winter without a winter garden, and I didn't like it.

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Photo credit (vole): By Original by Soebe, edited by Fashionslide - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10198072