What worked for me was to kill all the grubs. Go to any lawn and garden place get however many bags you need for the square footage and a spreader.
Might want to do part of the neighbor’s yards as well. Eventually they will creep back if you don’t.
I think the ground is way too porous for smoke bombs, dry ice or other airborn poisons to have a killer effect. my .02
Then my Dad told me the story of “a guy at work” who poured gas down every hole he could find. Waited a few minutes for the fumes to fill all the tunnels, then lit a match. Fwooooooomp! The entire lawn lifted 6" killing the moles and all the grass. Take with a grain of salt but a funny visual.
However, if you have reason to avoid insecticide, here’s another way. It’s dark underground, so moles have to find the bugs by sound. Get some of those tacky whirling plastic flower ornaments. They transmit their whirring and clattering to the ground, and the moles can no longer find lunch. They will go elsewhere. Yes, it really works. At my old house, four spinners were enough for the big back yard, and two protected the smaller front yard. My neighbors had moles; I had none.
You can get a battery powered noise stake to do the same thing. It’s not as tacky, but it’s more expensive.
As mks57 said, many cars are too clean to make this work as well as it once did. I used a soup can to build a coupling between a pipe and my lawnmower exhaust - better fumes than my car and easier to move around. This worked well against gophers, but wasn’t as easy as just shoving a road flare in the hole.
There are also solar-powered ones available. I haven’t tried them on moles (we resorted to the old harpoon trap for that one), but they didn’t work real well for gophers.
Kill grubs, moles move away. They like to eat, and grubs is what they eat.
Milky Spore does a WONDERFUL job at removing the grubs.
I spent 3 years fighting them with all the above mentioned products, bombs, poision, traps, fumes, vibrating repulsors, .22cal, and I’d have used large explosives if they had been available.
I went to the local Agway, bought milky spore, and haven’t had a mole problem since. It takes a season or so to get going, less if you have LOTS of grubs. Once it’s in place, it waits around for a grub to show, eats it from the inside out, and makes more spores to sit idle waiting for the next grub to arrive. A bit like salting the earth, but specific to grubs.
I do not make/sell any spores, I’m a lazy IT guy that got tired of repairing the damage done by these miscreant moles.
butler1850, you’re missing the point. The OP says, “Moles: Crush, Kill, Destroy”
Finesse has its place, and it’s admirable that you’ve found an elegant solution to saving your lawn from burrowing vertibrates as well as root-killing crane-fly larvae. But yours is hardly a “full prove method of killing moles.”
Take for instance another technique I developed in my youth involving The Common Machette. Did you know that it’s possible to drive a machette through a good 8 inches of soil (with a mole somewhere between inches 1 & 6). Did you know that an open-hilt machette is not a safe thrusting/stabbing weapon? This is because once the blade stops forward motion, the wielder’s hand is able to continue moving forward along the blade’s edge. In it’s initial trial run both the mole and my right hand both received a deep 4-inch long wound. The mole, being considerably smaller than I in proportion to the wound, did not recover, sad to say.
You don’t want to kill the moles - you want to kill what’s attracting the moles. As was pointed out, moles are carnivorous and eat grubs that will eat your grass and kill your plants. Kill the moles and you’re going to have worse problem.s
Now voles , that’s a different story. They use mole runs and do it plant roots. Them, kill with impunity and vigor.
Well, milky spore does sort of chew, kill, destroy the grubs. Spores eat grub from inside out, killing it, decomposition of what’s left does the destroy.
Now, if only we could find a way to mutate the grubs so they will eat the moles from the inside out, then we might have us an answer. Especially if it can be done noisily.
Human hair clippings, stuffed or sprinkled into any holes and runs. This was suggested in at least one book by Jerry Baker. Worked for me. Theory is that as the mole passes thru the human hair, it sticks and clings to mole fur. Mole will try visciously to remove clinging human hair clippings, to the point of scratching itself to death.
I have to thank this thread. In perusing the links, I discovered to my horror that the beetle I spotted in my barely-a-month-old law was a Japanese beetle. So, I reckon I’ll hit the lawn with the Milky Spore before things get out of hand.
Thanks for alerting me to a problem before it really became a problem!
Um, no. Tell you what, get a piece of hose and a respirator mask, hook that puppy up to ANY car exhaust, start the car and strap the mask on. And have a trusted friend standing by, for when you pass out and can’t take the mask off. There’s less unburnt fuel in the exhaust of newer cars now, but the oxygen in the air that moves through the engine is still all used up by combustion.
Holy Jesus Christ on a popsickle stick. I did not see that link before.
-But, um, Seems like that would only ADD to your landscaping woes, all things considered. After all, most people want to preserve their lawns but kill the moles. Blowing little trenches everywhere would be insanely comical but would not get you ahead at the end of the day.
~
To determine if you really should kill the moles, use the A/B/C/D system:
A: Appearance – if the moles look evil, perhaps bleeding out the mouth or with sharp, pointy teeth, then they could be aggressive and could turn dangerous.
B: Border – if the moles seem to be expanding their territory rapidly, like perhaps to the neighbors yard, it is more possible that they are invasive and could progress into rodential cancer. Also, if there border is irregular, for instance half of the back yard, one quarter of the neighbors yard, and the herb garden, this is a worrisome sign.
C: Color – if the moles are more than one color, perhaps agouti and brown or white and black, this is a sign that they could be dangerous and should be excised from your lawn.
D: Diameter – if a mole is wider than the eraser of a pencil, this is another danger sign.
To excise, I would recommend the following procedure. Sterilize the area with betadine. Dump this liberally on the lawn, perhaps spreading with a sterile 4x4 gauze patch. Let it dry. Locally numb the area with lidocaine, injecting it into the sub-lawnal tissue and giving it about 5 minutes to set in. Prep your sterile field around the now numb mole, and excise using a sharp scalpel or a weed whacker. Be sure to leave a generous border around the mole. Repair the incision using a running sublawnular stitch, with a monofilament suture such as 3-0 Dermalon. Apply triple antibiotic and a loose dressing, and the stitch can be removed from the lawn provided there are no complications after about two weeks. The excised mole should be coated with India Ink and quickly frozen using liquid nitrogen and sent for sectioning and several stainings, including Giemsa and H&E.
My boss (the guy in the original question) has a neighbor that finds fresh mole hills, caves them in, and waits for the little bastard to start flinging dirt back out. Thats the signal for when he lowers the end of the shotgun barrel and unloads.
Problem is, you have to stand there waiting for an hour with a shotgun in your hand…looking like a complete moron.
