MOLES HAVE A HOLE LOT TO OFFER

There are two consolations that I can offer if your garden is occupied by moles. The first is that it is an indicator that you have a healthy soil with plenty of earthworms – which are their favourite food (although they also eat slugs). The second is that you will be provided with a good supply of mole hills which, when mixed with garden compost and horticultural sharp sand, make excellent potting compost.

Mole numbers are on the increase, possibly due to the wet and mild winters extending their breeding season. They tend not to be common in acidic, poor or very compacted soil due to the lack of earthworms, but if you do have moles then there is not much that you can do about them short of trapping or poisoning them, which I would personally rather not do.

Moles are solitary creatures, only meeting up during the breeding season, which is between the end of February and May. During this time, they will make long tunnels just below the surface of the soil when looking for a mate. These shallow tunnels are also used as their reconnaissance network, when scanning for other moles, for determining the nature of the soil and for creating a kind of road system for any future feeding forays. They then dig deeper into the ground, often up to a metre down, where they will make their living quarters and cast up their molehills.

However many molehills you have in your garden, it is actually very unlikely that anything other than the largest of gardens will contain more than a handful of moles. Their average density is about 2-5 moles per acre of land, so an average-size garden will not be that densely populated.