“In the immortal words of Jean Paul Sartre, ‘Au revoir, gopher’.”
This line belongs to Carl Spackler, the groundskeeper played by Bill Murray in the film Caddyshack. He brought the epic battle of man versus gopher to life. And that battle goes on today. I spotted the mounds pretty much as soon as the snow melted, and started bugging Steve to get out there and work on it.
Little did I know that my brother-in-law Kevin, who also lives on the farm, is a gopher killer extraordinaire. As soon as he heard there were gophers by the garden, he sprung into action.
He has a gopher killing kit. It is a bucket that includes his traps, a trowel for finding the tunnels, a carpet remnant to kneel on while digging, and bug spray. He puts on his cap and padded shirt and heads over to set the traps. You have not seen determination until you’ve seen Kevin coming up the drive with his shovel and bucket to hunt gopher.
He’s explained the process to me. You go to a fresh mound and dig behind it. This allows you to find the tunnel entrances, which you expose with a trowel. You set a trap at both entrances.
The gopher thinks, “Why is there light in the tunnel? Why is my tunnel exposed?” He runs over to check it out and right into the trap. That is the way it is supposed to work.
But as we all know, gophers are crafty. Sometimes they come out at another place and go over and just fill in the tunnel again, avoiding the traps.
In this year’s gopher war, we had an early victory. The first time Kevin set the traps, we caught a gopher overnight. And then whatever other gophers were there (Kevin estimated 4-10 gophers, but I have no idea why) took off into the fields and we didn’t see another fresh mound for a month.
Last week, the gophers were back. I called Kevin as soon as I saw a mound… two actually. One by the compost and another close to the cold frame. And he let me know as soon as he got home from work he was on it. And he was.
Unfortunately, maybe because it rained that night, or maybe because the gopher is onto us, we were thwarted. The next morning, both hills were filled in from above, nothing in any of the four traps. 
Steve prefers poisoning. The procedure is similar. You dig out the tunnel entrance and using a special, long-handled cup invented for the purpose, you slide in a helping of gopher poison. He used this on a friend’s landscape project, and she recounted that one evening while she was having dinner a gopher came up out of the tunnel, staggered around, and fell over dead in front of her. What a ham!
In the end, you gotta use your superior intelligence and every tool at your disposal to get the varmint.
As Carl said: “To kill, you must know your enemy, and in this case my enemy is a varmint. And a varmint will never quit – ever. They’re like the Viet Cong – Varmint Cong. So you have to fall back on superior intelligence and superior firepower. And that’s all she wrote.”
We lost the battle, but by God, we will not lose the war.