You may recall my ambitious project to thwart the ravenous voles from eating my dahlia tubers (described in detail in an earlier blog post).
I'm happy to report that the boxes were a SUCCESS! I've had ZERO tubers consumed by voles that were in the boxes.
The boxes were built to accommodate the space that I had, which was rather limited. Had I more room, I would've make the boxes wider to give the plants better spacing.
By late summer, the flowers were doing just fine despite the less than ideal spacing.
As an aside, I experimented with planting tubers in 16" pots, and burying the pots.
I found that the tubers did well in the pots, and most importantly, the voles were unable to get to the tubers. In the photo below, I used vinyl coated hardware cloth instead of a pot. If you look closely, you can see where the vole has tunneled all around the pot, trying to get in, but was unsuccessful. A small victory!
This was my 2021; while not a total success, the plants I attempted to protect were saved from the voles. Those that I didn't protect, were lost. Such is life in the country....
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