Son of a bitch, I’m sick of these voles! I thought I had taken all the proper precautions to protect my tulips but apparently, I left behind just enough space for one of the little bastards to find their way into one of my tulip beds and destroy my crop…
I thought that by lining the bottom of my raised beds with doubled over chicken wire that I could keep them out – it worked for one bed, but not the other. Guess I missed a spot.
I tried applying castor oil to the area of invasion – I am a soap maker after all, and I use castor oil in my soaps, so I literally have gallons on hand – but I guess you need the stinky version of castor oil, not the makes-lots-of-lather-in-your-soap version. So that didn’t work against the little fur balls from hell.
I decided to make a concoction out of cayenne pepper and castor oil – apparently, they like spicy, skin nourishing dressings on their tulip bulbs…
I bought the powdered vole/mole deterrent from the local big box home store and that was a waste of money.
I finally took drastic measures – I decided to pull every single remaining tulip bulb from the bed that had been invaded by voles. I took the bulbs and planted them in growbags to see if I could salvage at least a few flowers…even if this failed, at least I would have the pleasure of denying the voles a meal from my flower farm.
Some of the transplanted tulips survived and I had successful blooms. Others did not like being transplanted while in the middle of forming buds so they just kinda shriveled up and died. In the end, I ended up losing around 700 tulips in total. A small number for a large farm – but I am a micro-scale flower farm and only planted 1500 total so that REALLY hurt.
This leaves me with a decision to make – do I add hardware cloth to my raised beds for next year and hope that works? Do I grow all my tulips in grow bags instead of raised beds? Do I investigate hydroponic methods for tulips? Do I scrap tulips altogether? Or do I just quit while I’m ahead and give up on the whole flower farm side of the business?
I guess I have some time to figure this out but I’m feeling really defeated now…