Pocket gopher, courtesy of Wikipedia

We’re putting together a short vegetable gardening pamphlet and could use some advice, specifically about gophers. Thankfully, we don’t have any experience dealing with them. Something about our neighborhood, either the lead in the soil or the police helicopters, seems to have made gophers extinct here.

Standard advice when planting a tree or installing a raised bed in gopher infested areas is to use galvanized hardware cloth or gopher wire as an underground barrier. We even mentioned this in our first book. The main problem I have with this advice is that the galvanized metal used for hardware cloth and gopher wire leaches significant amounts of zinc as it breaks down. Zinc, in high quantities, is toxic to plants. And, when using cages for trees, I’d worry that the cages would not break down soon enough, causing the roots to circle.

Plastic, I’m fairly certain, would not work as the gophers would chew through it. And stainless steel is really expensive. Yes, you can trap gophers, and I’ll include info on that. But does anyone know of an alternative material for use as an underground gopher barrier? Extra points for pointing to a peer reviewed study.

Note: We just learned a new fact: “gopher” is a generic term that encompasses a few different critters. In other words, your gopher may not be my gopher. There are pocket gophers and a variety of ground squirrels who get called gophers. All are pesky. But the pocket gopher is sometimes called the “true gopher.”