What does your family like to do for fun? In our time off, we like to dig giant trenches throughout our front yard! I’m pretty sure our neighbors think we’re crazy. A little over a year ago, we bought this house with a beautifully seeded lawn sloping down to the front door. And now we’re systematically tearing it apart, first breaking the sod up by hand and then with a tiller and now digging trenches as deep as we can get.
Well, it’s all in the name of rodent control, more specifically groundhogs. I’ve worked on farms with groundhog pressure in the past and, as you well know if you’ve experienced the same, they can end your season before it even begins. I figured with this project, we should try our hardest to get it right the first time. I’ve never had any success with groundhog-abatement measures in the past, but did some research and found that digging fencing two or more feet into the ground can be effective, so that’s what we’re trying first.
We started off attempting to trench by hand a week ago, with a pick axe and shovel, but after it took almost two hours to complete a two-foot section, we realized that wasn’t the way to go and decided to rent a trenching machine. This past week, Mike headed out to Home Depot to rent what he described as “the giant killing machine” and I have to admit it did look like something out of a horror movie. After several hours’ work with the trencher, Mike created a solid two-foot trench, into which we buried rabbit fencing. And throughout the coming months, I guess we’ll find out who wins- us or the groundhogs!
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