Found my gophers' cache!

[Robert_Parks]

At the end of a day of digging out beds to install hardware cloth liners[1], I was making another crater and the shovel hit a large void and then I saw a cavern full of bulbs. I think I have recovered a significant portion of the bulbs that used to be in the front beds...after discarding the Oxalis purpurea, 75-100 bulbs are left. So I'll do a rough sort (gladiolus-obvious, also over 2" in diameter, Ixia, also distinguishable, Zephyanthes should be dormant), but accurately sorting the Tritileia, Leucocoryne, Narcissus, Scilla, and Ornithogalum is unlikly to be accurate. And there is a partly gnawed large tuber that looks like it might have a growing point, but I didn't lose anything with that sort of tuber.

Anyway, mostly they can go back to where they started (20-40 feet away from the cache)...they were mostly mixed plantings anyway, now they can be mixed plantings with no label nearby.

Robert
in pleasant San Francisco, where there is one more day of nice weather before it rains for a long week.



[1] Early this fall the gophers cleared all my ground planted bulbs (amaryllids and irids).

[David Pilling]

Interesting they take bulbs they can't eat - amaryllids. Scope for planting decoy/fake bulbs.

I lost almost all my crocus this year (to mice), a lot of sad crocus outer fibre was to be found. I'd love to find crocus blooming in unexpected places where they have been cached, but I suspect crocus is so delicious it has to be eaten right away.

The mice do cache some stuff - always find French marigold seeds hidden away.

[Robert_Parks]

Interesting they take bulbs they can't eat - amaryllids. Scope for planting decoy/fake bulbs.

I lost almost all my crocus this year (to mice), a lot of sad crocus outer fibre was to be found. I'd love to find crocus blooming in unexpected places where they have been cached, but I suspect crocus is so delicious it has to be eaten right away.

The mice do cache some stuff - always find French marigold seeds hidden away.

I don't even try planting crocus or tulips (not that most of them like the climate either). It appears that the larger Ixia bulbs are gone, and anything with a small bulb and lots of greenery are gone (Dierama, Corydalis, etc.). There are spots of Oxalis purpurea in both my neighbors' yards, and Oxalis obtusa is thoroughly distributed in one of the potted plant beds.

They don't bother Amaryllis, large Narcissus, or Urginea, and haven't touched the Nerines, so maybe Brunsvigia is also safe? Or maybe the bulbs have to be too big, because they certainly have taken miniature Daffodils.

Argh. Off to buy more hardware cloth and do the beds next to the house.

Robert

[Randy Linke]

I had a former landscaper friend who had planted over 10,000 daffodil bulbs in a clients yard.  The client called to complain that most of the daffodils hadn't come up.  He went by and looked over the fence and found a gopher had moved most of the bulbs, the hillside below their fence was a field of daffodils.