To a certain extent it makes us cheerful when a neatly piled pile in the garden reveals the traces of a mole in the morning. However, if there was a whole family of blind cave diggers active, fun quickly turned serious!
How can you successfully get rid of a mole?
To get rid of a mole, you can stick an empty bottle of high-proof alcohol (at least 40 percent by volume) upside down into the mole's passages or insert crushed garlic cloves. Acoustic methods such as wind turbines with squeaking noises can also help.
And before we delve further into the matter: Since these troublemakers are protected, the means to get rid of them are very limited. This means that no one has the right to hurt a mole or try to kill it with toxic substances. Even if medicine says that alcohol is harmful, in this case it is not.
The smell of alcohol really gets on the nerves of moles, so much so that they leave their beloved labyrinth under their garden beds and even avoid it in the future and for all eternity. Nevertheless, no one has to pour their entire supply of spirits down the aisles under the molehill. An empty bottle of former hard liquor, which is inserted into the hole with the opening facing down, is sufficient. By the way, the trick doesn't work with beer; it should be from 40 percent by volume upwards, then the smell of alcohol spreads quickly through the underground cave system.
Alternative methods for mole hunting
It is often reported on the relevant gardening blogs that a cloth soaked in alcohol leads to similar success. However, the effective radius of such an action is just three meters, so this method seems a bit questionable. Garlic seems more promising. However, the toes have to be crushed so that the sharp, aromatic smell can spread widely in the cave passages. While the effect of commercially available ultrasonic devices (€29.00 on Amazon) is very controversial, certain acoustic methods are still suitable for driving away particularly hardened moles. Examples of this are buried bottles that produce a kind of whistling sound as soon as wind flows into them or self-made wind turbines with squeaking noises that reflect the sound into the opening of the molehill using buried metal posts.
By the way: If none of the home remedies mentioned work, your uninvited garden visitors are probably not moles, but water voles or voles. And they, in turn, have a much weaker sense of smell, which requires other means to be used.
